LiveJournal, another blogging service, is down today due to a power failure at Internap, LiveJournal's data center. From a legal perspective, it's exciting to think about these possible causes of action (I have no idea whether these will occur, and these are based purely on my own casual understanding of the situation).

The first and most obvious possible cause of action is LiveJournal against Internap. LiveJournal has said this isn't the first time this has happened. I don't know how a Web hosting provider can let both its primary and backup power go down more than once without some kind of defective service. I don't know anything about the service level agreement between Internap and LiveJournal, but I'd be surprised if there weren't at least some nasty letters to follow.

Second, Six Apart, the people behind MoveableType and TypePad (two other blogging services), just acquried LiveJournal. Is there a provision in the acquisition agreement to address this kind of outage? Was there a failure on the part of LiveJournal or Six Apart part to conduct proper due diligence of a company so critical to its business operations? Is there a material adverse change clause that is meant to be triggered in the case of an event like this? I don't know. What a way to get started in the new relationship!

Finally, the people with no recourse? LiveJournal users. They pay very little or nothing. Even if they paid something, what could the damages be from an unavailable blog, which is, in most cases, simply a recreational activity? And my guess is that LiveJournal has disclaimed or severely limited liability for this kind of outage in its service agreement with its customers. At least I would hope so.

By the way, just in case you were wondering, this blog, while powered by Blogger, is actually hosted by EarthLink, who I pay monthly for Web and domain hosting services. At any point in time, my client data is backed up on different media formats in at least three states.