It seems that mega webcomic collective Blank Label Comics is currently down. Here’s the information as provided from their service provider:

On Saturday, at approximately 5:45 PM CST, the Houston1 Data Center for ThePlanet had an electrical event.

What this did was blow out the electrical room completely, including three walls. The damage has been better assessed, and was worse than originally anticipated.

http://service-update.theplanet.com/

Unfortunately, of the servers I run, the largest server is in the Phase 1 section, which means the 1/3 of the machines that cannot be brought back online quickly with outside power.

The other machines are in unknown areas. They may or may not come online by Monday morning.

The changes that have been made to DNS and the sites mean that once the systems are back online, sites should begin to show up again within 15 minutes of changing DNS back to the normal facility. The systems themselves appear to be completely intact.

To answer the question of why backup sites aren’t up and running already, it has to do with required bandwidth and server utilities.

Thank you for your cooperation and understanding, and we’ll hopefully be back in business by Tuesday morning, and be able to make future plans.

Troy C. Belding

Bookworm Computing

The Blanklabel collective contains such popular webcomics as Shortpacked!, Melonpool, Real Life Comics, and Wapsi Square, so you can imagine the effects this is probably having on the webcomic readers.

The Scienteers will update you as soon as we find out more information.

Blank Label Comics seems to be partially up at the moment. The webcomics hosted on the site seem to be up now (though some of them don’t seem to be showing their most current update. However the main site doesn’t seem to be up at the moment… or at least it’s still displaying the downtime message. So there may still be some kinks in the system.

The Scienteers will update you as info comes in.

Blank Label Comics is now completely up again. Check them out, and tell them The Scienteers sent you!

It seems Blank Label Comics is down again. The main site and forums are completely. Some of the comics like Shortpacked and Real Life Comics are still up thanks to the use of temporary sites. Other comics like Melonpool are down completely.

Here is the latest bit of information via the Shortpacked main page:

The data center at which Blank Label Comics is housed had a catastrophic failure early this evening, blowing out three walls of their power room. They are anticipating that systems will begin coming back online Sunday afternoon, but until then, temporary sites have been put together.

Wow. I hope that information was supposed to be posted on Sunday morning, or else they’re going to be down for a while.

Blank Label Comics is no longer down. Woo!