According to a report from the Washington Post, an underground fire sent flames shooting from a manhole near Baltimore's City Hall at approximately 1 a.m. on Monday. Firefighters were able to extinguish the fire before the morning rush hour, but the fire reportedly damaged electrical cables, including the power supply to some surrounding traffic lights.

Alabanza customers began reporting downtime at approximately 8:00 a.m. eastern time Monday, some of them through a thread on Web Hosting forum Web Hosting Talk (webhostingtalk.com). Forum posters reported being unable to contact Alabanza.

Electrical workers in Baltimore reportedly shut off power to some buildings in the area, though service was expected to return by noon.

Calls to Alabanza were unable to connect. As of 1:00 p.m., the company's Web site remained offline.

The outage comes one year, almost to the day, after a fire took Alabanza's data center offline in September of 2003.