Virginia Quake Sends Social Networks Into Overdrive

“I feel the earth... move.. under my feet... I feel the sky tumbling down, a-tumbling down..”

It’s possible that some East Coast residents may have seen tweets about today's quake in Virginia before the ground shook if they were far enough away from the epicenter. That’s due to the way the shock waves travel.

USGS map shows the epicenter of today's quake on the East Coast.The magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck central Virginia on Tuesday afternoon, prompting people from New York to North Carolina, and as far west as Michigan and Illinois to ask, “Did you feel that?”

As of 3:45pm ET Tuesday, the hashtag #dcquake was the second-most-talked-about subject worldwide on Twitter; that and the #earthquake tag were the top trending topics in some of the cities most affected, which included Washington, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia.

Twitter could have been one of the few ways those affected could get through in the minutes following the quake: MSNBC reported that Verizon Wireless suffered heavy congestion on its East Coast network, and anecdotally I can report that AT&T calls from time to time failed to connect.

Text, Text, Text

Text messaging worked like a charm, though, and is the recommended method of communication, according to wireless industry group CTIA.

“In these high volume instances, there can be delays,” spokesperson Amy Storey told PCWorld. “We encourage people to send text messages and emails to contact their loved ones until volume returns to normal.” Storey says knows of no major infrastructure damage

It was crazy.

I am located in Reading, Pa., and I sure felt it. I was actually in contact with a PCWorld editor talking about the news of the day when my home office began to shake. It was just like the earthquakes you hear about in California: a slow rolling motion that builds in intensity, then slowly stops. Yes, I ran for a doorway.

The shaking seemed to last about 30 to 45 seconds. Given that it hit a so-called “megalopolis,” the social media networks lit up like a Christmas tree. Facebook walls sped into overdrive, and Twitter was quickly awash with reports of the experiences of those affected.

Tell the USGS All About It

Above and beyond the obvious spike in communication, social media is also helping scientists to better understand the quake. For several years now, the U.S. Geological Survey has been using a platform called “Did You Feel It?” which crowdsources anecdotal reports from the Internet on earthquake events.

If you indeed felt it, head on over to the USGS site and describe what you felt. The reports will be used to develop a broader picture of the severity of quakes and to aid in the agency’s research, it says. Even if you didn’t feel Tuesday’s temblor, I suggest that you check out the USGS coverage--it's pretty stunning how far away people felt the earth move.

For more tech news and commentary, follow Ed on Twitter at @edoswald, on Facebook, or on Google+.

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Data Centers Largely Unaffected by East Coast Quake

Staff were evacuated at several data centers following Tuesday's earthquake but operations at most facilities appear to have been unaffected, according to Twitter posts and other sources.

The earthquake was centered in Virginia and hit just before 2 p.m. local time with a magnitude of 5.8, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That's not particularly big by global standards, but it was enough to shake buildings and send people pouring into the streets in Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C., according to news reports. It was the biggest earthquake to hit Virginia since 1897, according to the USGS.

Amazon Web Services, which operates a large data center in Virginia, said its services were unaffected. "All AWS services in the US East region are operating normally at the present time," a spokeswoman said via e-mail.

One AWS customer did report a brief uptick in page loading times. SeatGeek, a search site for tickets, saw a "pretty nasty" spike in its page response times when the earthquake struck.

"Over here at SeatGeek, we were excitedly discussing the tremor when Mike, our trusty sysadmin, realized that our Amazon AWS servers were all in Virginia, right near the epicenter," the company said in a blog post, where it posted a graph showing the slowdown.

"Lessons Learned? 1) Earthquakes make Web Servers sad [and] 2) Real time system monitoring is awesome," the company wrote. The spike lasted about two minutes, SeatGeek said.

Many other service providers rushed to Twitter after the earthquake to report that their operations were unaffected, including Microsoft's Dynamics Online CRM group.

"East Coast earthquake has not impacted the [North America] datacenter so CRM Online is business as usual; close monitoring during aftershocks," the CRM group said in a Twitter post.

"The Razor data center was not impacted by the #earthquake. All services are currently normal," said hosting company Razor Servers, whose main data center is in Philadelphia.

"Just ran regression tests in our VA data center- Everything is up & running normally," Contact Solutions said in a tweet. "I guess we can say we run an earthquake-proof service!"

Bluto's Hosting, Clook Internet, PAETEC and Distributed Systems Service were among others reporting no interruption to service. Big commercial operators such as Digital Realty Trust, QTS, Sungard and Terremark also had no problems, Datacenter Dynamics reported.

Several data center workers said they had been evacuated from their data centers, one as far north as Boston. Other companies jumped on the chance to promote disaster recovery services.

James Niccolai covers data centers and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow James on Twitter at @jniccolai. James's e-mail address is james_niccolai@idg.com

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