This week's Steam Message acknowledges the extended Steam outages that resulted from the recent storms in the Seattle area, which has taught Valve they need some help from the department of redundancy department:

It was a busy and windy week here at Valve. As most of the community knows by now, last week a major windstorm hit the greater Seattle area. Power outages are fairly common in the area, but the magnitude of this storm knocked out our datacenter, resulting in about 20 hours Steam interruption. This was very frustrating for everyone here and we know it was frustrating for you as well. We learned a lot and are taking steps to make sure that when the next storm like this hits our area 15-20 years from now *fingers crossed*, people will still be playing games on Steam while we are buying flashlight batteries.