For all those speculating about SE dropping the ball by not having a recovery plan in place I would like to add some clarification. The logistics of replicating data on a realtime system internationally are unbelievably complex. Even if the infrastructure of the country could support the traffic the financial cost of securing guarenteed international bandwidth and redundent routing would be financially prohibitive. The fees paid by FFXI subscribers would not even scratch the surface of these costs and that is why this sort of solution is only really available to high level financial infrastructure. Even if FFXI subscribers paid 10 times as much as they do now this solution would be out of reach.

Even for the biggest companies spending 100s of millions of dollars on their disaster recovery plans would be brought down by a national infrastructure outage. Some disasters are just to widespread to be able to manage effectively. This situation is out of SEs hands and will not be resolved until there is consistant power supply both to the servers and the infrastructure connecting them to the internet.

For those hoping that the data may be moved to a secondary server house in another country I would say it is unlikely. Although there are 24 worlds each of these is made up of many physical servers precisely configured together to form a game environment. I would not be surprised if they were running over 200 physical servers in total (amount really varies depending on the specification of the hardware). Setting up a mirror of this environment is a job that takes weeks at best, even if you can source the hardware quickly. Deploying the software, configuring it and testing the result takes even longer. Migrating the data across on top of this and you have a process that takes a long time. Even if SE did choose to do this they would be facing more downtime when things returned to normal as they would want to move the operation back again, easy physical access is essential when you have so much hardware to maintain.

The japanese people have a lot of serious issues to deal with right now but rest assured one of the top priorities will be getting power distribution back to normal as it is directly damaging the economy. In the meantime we should reflect on how easy the world can be spun into chaos and appreaciate how lucky and priviledged our lives usually are.

Wishing the Japanese populous a speedy and dignified recovery.