Datacenter oops

All of a sudden several of my servers went dark. I couldn’t access them, nor could I get to the firewall that connects to them. At first I thought it might be a hiccup in the internet connectivity to the datacenter, but after a few minutes I figured my firewall might have run into problems of some kind. I wrote to the colocation provider running the datacenter and asked if they could take a look, and this was their response:

I am sorry, some people who was working on next cabinet accidentally unplug your power strip. I hope nothing bad happen about your data.

Umm… what? My “power strip” is a six-foot-tall device bolted to the side of the cabinet, with a high-amp plug (not your standard wall outlet). It takes real effort to unplug that guy.

Luckily my servers all came back online fine, but wow.