Like so many other people in the Northeast US, the Quartz staff was displaced by Hurricane Sandy. We managed just fine and escaped the sort of devastation felt in some parts of the region, but today is our first day back in the office after a nomadic week.
Our headquarters in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan lost power on the night of Monday, Oct. 29. We were all at home by then, and the site was experiencing higher traffic than we’d seen since launch, boosted by widespread sharing of our collection of webcams along the East Coast and tips for keeping your phone charged. (At least 70% of our visitors on Oct. 29 came from social media, including 29% from Facebook and 27% from Twitter.) The site held up just fine, thanks to our developers working from home.
When the power went out around 9 p.m. ET on Oct. 29, we saw an immediate spike in visitors coming to Quartz from mobile phones—jumping to a third of all visitors in the 10 p.m. hour. (Only phones are included in “mobile” traffic here; tablets aren’t counted.)
You can imagine that New Yorkers suddenly without power had switched to their phones to keep tabs on the storm. That’s consistent with other sites, including our largest source of traffic that night, Twitter, which reported that mobile usage doubled in the hours following the power outage:
And while our spike in mobile traffic was likely concentrated in New York, visitors in the US only accounted for 58% of Quartz traffic last week. We saw intense interest in coverage of Sandy and other news from France, Canada, the UK, and Sweden.
Back in SoHo, our office was mostly spared by the storm: a window popped out of its frame, but the biggest issue was the lack of electricity. On boarded up windows around the neighborhood, a street artist offered helpful updates:
With the newsroom and some of our homes lacking power, the Quartz team spent the rest of the week in virtual-office mode. Christopher Mims detailed some our best tips for working from home in this piece.
To keep things running smoothly, we relied heavily on instant messaging and Google Hangouts, which we use twice a day even when a hurricane hasn’t swept through our newsroom. A lot of our staff always works remotely.
Power came back to SoHo and our office on Friday, Nov. 2, toward the end of the day. We were able to confirm electricity was back by communicating with the Quartz lightbulb, which is hooked up to the internet over WiFi with a Belkin WeMo Switch. The lightbulb was on, and we were back in business.
The heat isn’t quite working here at the office yet, but it’s nice to be back together again, having weathered the storm. By the way, we ended October, our first full month operation, with 840,343 unique visitors, a figure that blew away our expectations.