SEATTLE -- A fire at Fisher Plaza has disrupted stations that broadcast from the building near the Seattle Center and cut service to many Seattle-based Internet sites.

Seattle City Light told KIRO that a giant electrical hub in the parking garage beneath the building shorted out Thursday night, starting a small fire at 11 p.m.

The fire forced the evacuation of the building and caused the sprinkler system to activate. Though the fire was put out, water from the sprinkler system flooded the generator room, which left the building without power or backup electricity.

Fisher Plaza's data center, considered a state-of-the-art hub for computer servers, is down, resulting in a massive, costly online disruption that took hundreds of Internet companies offline.

James Lapic with Singlepoint leases servers inside Fisher Plaza. He said all their data and ability to do business, is in jeopardy.

In addition, Authorize.net, a company that handles credit card transactions for tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors, is one of the sites that was knocked offline.

Silicon Valley technology expert Rob Enderle said companies that use Authorize.net could potentially be losing millions of dollars a minute.

Other Web sites are losing millions in ad revenue and companies that store data at Fisher plaza could lose irretrievable information for its customers.

Authorize.net reported on its Twitter page at 11 a.m. that global processing had been restored.

KOMO Radio is broadcasting Friday from a building at its transmitter on Queen Anne hill in Seattle, and KOMO TV broadcasted morning segments from a truck in Kerry Park.

Crews from several companies continue to work to get the building back on line, officials said.

Rob Dunlop, vice president of operations for Fisher Communications Inc., said he hopes stations can resume operations in the building later Friday and there is no word on what caused the fire.