Valve, y?

So After getting back from class, I decide that I need to play a nice relaxing couple hours of HL2ep1. Well sadly things did not turn out to be in my favour.

First, I come home to a locked up machine, totally unresponsive but a simple fix none the less. After getting back into the familar confines of XP, I am greeted by multiple "We have recovered from a serious error" messages. I'll investigate those later.

Then to my surprise Steam pops up, requesting my logon information. This brings a little wonder to me as steam has always been a good little app that does its thing in the background. I disreguard the request as I take a couple mins to probe my machine for reasons to the failure.

I go back to the steam client and enter my credentials. "Steam is having troubles connecting to the Steam servers". WTFBBQ!?! Thinking that the issue is on my end I do some simple connectivity tests, lo and behold I see no reason I am receiving that message. So I tried in vain a couple more times. Now I am ticked.

So I wander over to the steampowered website, and hit up the forums. They take forever to load, this is not normal. I think to myself, oh shit...

Well turns out the "master" servers which apparently handle the login information have been affected by a power outage caused by this bugger of a storm going through the washington/oregon states. So 1 for me.

Now this brought to mind the question, Valve why are all the login servers in one place? From a network standpoint this is a major no-no, especially since Valve's Steam service runs world-wide. A single point of failure. So where are the secondary servers that are in some sort of hot/cold standby, prepared for such an event? So far no where to be found ><