A fire at The Planet's H1 data center in Houston, Texas on Saturday has taken out thousands of websites.

In messages posted on the web hosting firm's forum, the company blamed a faulty transformer for the fire. No servers or networking equipment were damaged, but the data centre remains without power, after The Planet shut down all generators "as instructed by the fire department.

About 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers are affected by the outage. B3ta.com, a popular British comedy site, is a high profile casualty.

The Planet is posting hourly updates on its forum. It has five other data centers, which remain up and running.

Update

As at 5.06pm CDT, Monday power is restored to 6,000 servers. The remaining 3,000 servers, which were powered by the electricity room "where the explosion occurred", should be juiced up within two hours, The Planet boss Douglas Erwin wrote on the service update page. These servers will be offline again for a few hours next Saturday or the following Saturday, so that The Planet can rebuild the electrity room. ®

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