I Felt a Great Disturbance in Web 2.0, as if Millions of Start-Ups Cried Out in Terror and Were Suddenly Silenced.

Two years ago we decided to move our servers to 365 Main because we believed its San Francisco facility could accommodate our expected growth better than any other, and for a comparable price. And that’s exactly what has happened. 365 Main has fulfilled its brand promise of [the] ‘world’s finest data centers’ by delivering the reliability and uptime that attracted us in the first place.”

–Dale Emel, director of technology services at RedEnvelope

Well, 365 Main couldn’t have picked a worse day to celebrate its uptime record, now could it. Yesterday morning the data center operator broadcast a press release announcing that it had provided online retailer RedEnvelope with two years of 100% uptime. “To ensure uptime for key tenants such as RedEnvelope, 365 Main provides modern power and cooling infrastructure,” 365 said in the release. “The company’s San Francisco facility includes two complete backup systems for electrical power to protect against a power loss. In the unlikely event of a cut to a primary power feed, the state-of-the-art electrical system instantly switches to live backup generators, avoiding costly downtime for tenants and keeping the data center continuously running.”

Quite a boast. And one that was made absurdly ironic a few hours later when a power outage in downtown San Francisco interrupted 365’s theoretically uninterruptible power supplies and disabled RedEnvelope and a host of other Web sites.

The outage, which began at about 2 p.m. PDT, knocked a who’s-who of Web 2.0 outfits offline for a good hour or so. How is that a company that touts itself as the operator of “the world’s finest data centers” failed its clients so miserably? Said Miles Kelly, 365 Main’s vice president of marketing, “I don’t know.”

Truly an unfortunate turn of events for 365 and one sure to give its PR team nightmares for years to come.