Being down in Australia it's hard to get much information, but I turned on Fox News, apparantly it was pretty bad. No injuries luckily, but it was a blazing fire, 15 feet high, on top of that many propane gases were released into the atmosphere.
It's been reported that over 38,000 homes and businesses without power (Source: CBS )
I was able to gain access to Hostforweb momentarily, and they told me this:
Power was out in chicago backup generators at DC have failed power has now been restored servers are booting back up now
Apparantly there have been some bad lightning storms in the region recently, which may have contributed to it, but from what I can tell it was caused from high temperatures (high 90's).The power in Chicago has been lost and subsequently our provider routes are down. We are waiting for this to be resolved as it is effecting more than half the city. Thanks for your patience.
http://www.belleville.com/mld/bellevill ... 981877.htm
http://cbs2chicago.com/illinois/IL--Com ... _news_html
Hopefully we will remain online now, thanks to Hostforweb for getting us back up!