Amidst all of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, there’s some good news on the horizon – or at least, it is if you happen to be a celebrity with a predilection for getting caught with your pants down.

A host of the nation’s top celebrity-hounding media sites, mostly Gawker, but also Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, were taken offline overnight as Hurricane Sandy flooded New York City and its data centers.

The floods drowned Gawker’s entire network of eight blogs as both its main data center and backup were taken offline at the peak of the storm. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed websites also experienced blips, although these were restored and went back online fairly soon.

The finger of blame can be pointed at Datagram, a New York-based web hosting and internet provider. A message posted on BuzzFeed confirmed the problem lay with them, saying that Datagram lost all power shortly after its basement was flooded and a crucial pump broke down.

Datagram were unlucky – as Hurricane Sandy tore its way inland, dozens of major data centers battled to stay online. Some smaller ones fell by the wayside, causing problems for lesser known sites, although most major data centers were able to weather the storm, with Datagram being the only high profile victim we know of.

Gawker appears to be the big loser here – both its main site and its popular tech blog Gizmodo still appear to be down, more than 12 hours after they fizzled out. Gizmodo tweeted the following message just after 14:00 EDT:

About twenty minutes later, Gizmodo posted the following tweet, apparently confident that they would be back online soon:

Unfortunately for them, it seems that whatever Plan B they had failed to materialize. Having just attempted to access the main Gawker site, at 05:00 EDT this morning, I was presented with the following message:

Gizmodo’s latest status update claims that its “working hard to get a working version up and working”, but this seems fairly optimistic, with gawker Media’s Greg Takayama admitting in another tweet that he was currently unable to contact a representative of Datagram:

We’ll keep you updated on Gawker and any other Sandy-related tech problems as soon as we hear of them ;)