Update: BuzzFeed Director of Communications Alice Suh tells WebProNews, “BuzzFeed is up and running after the hard work of our team who worked all night bring our servers back to life. We are no longer operating off the compromised data center.”

The digital world has not been immune to the effects of Hurricane Sandy, as some sites went down thanks to the storm. Two major forces on the web, Gawker (which includes Gawker, LifeHacker, Gizmodo, io9, Kotaku, DeadSpin, Jalopnik and Jezebel) and BuzzFeed, both saw outages.

Buzzfeed appears to be back up and running, but still has more work to do. A message on the site says, “We’re Up! But still recovering from Sandy…” The site points you to its Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook pages, but there is fresh content coming in on the site.

Gawker sites, on the other hand, are still down, displaying a message that says, “Our New York City data center is still offline thanks to Hurricane Sandy. We are working as quickly as possible to restore the full site, but in the interim you can view updates at http://updates.gawker.com.” For other Gawker sites, replace updates.gawker.com with updates.nameofsite.com.

Both BuzzFeed and Gawker have relied on Tumblr to post content for its users. Gawker’s “updates” sites are on Tumblr, and the actual sites are redirecting to their Tumblr counterparts, where they continue to post fresh content.

Mathew Ingram wrote a few days ago about “what Tumblr can tell us about the future of media.” It was an interesting piece, but I don’t think this is what he had in mind. Perhaps Hurricane Sandy has proven another point about Tumblr. It’s a way for publications to reach readers even if their primary platform is unavailable.

Of course, that requires Tumblr to be up and running too. Last week, the service had some downtime of its own.