The sky isn't falling, but it sure feels like the web is falling apart lately. Last Friday, Google went dark for full 5 minutes, resulting in a 40 percent drop in Internet traffic and highlighting just how dependent we are on the company's various online services. Around the same time, Outlook.com went offline and...Read more...
Imagine if, for whatever reason, Google one day decided to pull the plug on all of its operations and shut down its servers without notice. It wouldn't quite be what some imagined Y2K to be like, but given how popular Google services like Search, Gmail, and Docs are to the masses, it would be a shock to the Internet...Read more...
Ah, downed Internet access. It’s a time to grab a cup of coffee, dust off that book you’ve been meaning to read…or go to a neighbor’s house and use their Internet connection to read about the problems with yours. And if you live in the southern U.S. and have AT&T’s U-verse package, you’re probably doing...Read more...
For the second time in about a week, Netflix is experiencing an outage. On Christmas Eve, many users lost streaming capabilities and didn’t get it back until well into Christmas morning. Netflix pointed the finger at Amazon Web Services, and indeed it appears that an Amazon facility in Virginia was to blame. This time around, Netflix...Read more...
The Cloud Saved Games feature of Xbox LIVE went down on December 29th, which infuriated users, particularly those who were counting on some day-long gaming to pass the time during holiday family visits. Microsoft engineers scrambled to fix the problem, although the outage lasted until early this morning. “It...Read more...
Talk about an unfortunate way to spend Christmas Eve. For a great many Netflix engineers, they're up right this moment working to patch up an error that has sent Netflix streams offline for many. Reportedly, there's an outage at Amazon Web Services that's impacting Netflix, leaving many people who are looking to...Read more...
Zoho, a provider of online business, productivity, and collaboration applications, experienced a brief power outage Friday, taking its products and services offline for several hours. According to Zoho’s blog, the outage began at 8:25am PST, and even when power was restored by 9:15am, the company had a lot of work to do to get its service...Read more...
Remember when that huge hack put Sony's PSN users out of a connection for what felt like an eternity? Sony offered some gifts as a peace offering, and now, it looks like Research In Motion is taking a note out of a book that no company looks forward to reading. Earlier this month, RIM's servers went on the fritz on a near-global basis, leaving...Read more...
If you were unable to access your Netflix streaming service last night, don't feel bad, you weren't being singled out by a higher power. Instead, Netflix suffered yet another service outage on Tuesday night, this latest one lasting roughly four hours, according to reports. "Netflix is up and on as usual," Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said...Read more...
Blame it on older Windows clients. That's the verdict, forensically, from Skype's investigation into what caused the recent massive Skype outage. Skype is a P2P service, and relies on supernodes, which exist outside firewalls, for its directory service. The current Windows version of Skype is 5.0.0.156. However, a bug in 5.0.0.152 caused those...Read more...
Holiday shopping at one of the web's popular retailers was impossible for some European users over the weekend. Amazon's websites in Europe were down for more than half an hour on Sunday night. Although a group of activists by the name "Anonymous" had encouraged an online attack in an attempt to crash Amazon.com by overwhelming it with requests,...Read more...
Google's services outage today was apparently Google mucking with something on the backend, in a sort of "don't touch if it ain't broke" mistake. Admittedly, we're being snarky, as Google was working on something that definitely needs addressing, but it still made a major impact on systems around the world. It's the old "we are running out...Read more...
If you had difficulties accessing your Comcast email over the weekend, you weren’t alone. The cable provider’s servers suffered some technical problems on Saturday that took the SmartZone email system down for several hours. Potentially millions of subscribers were without email during the outage. Comcast suffered a similar outage in October....Read more...
Perhaps getting its inspiration from President Obama's joint address to Congress and the American people this last Tuesday, Google has decided to also increase its transparency with the public. In actuality, Google's decision probably has more to do with Tuesday's Gmail outage, which lasted for about two and a half hours. (The fact that both...Read more...
When's the last time you remember your Gmail being down for longer than one or two seconds? And who's to say that glitch wasn't just your router acting up? Today, Google experienced a Gmail outage that was remarkably widespread and lengthy for its standards. It was so "severe," in fact, that the company actually made the outage public and...Read more...
BlackBerry suffered another e-mail outage on Friday, but not one as severe as the April incident. In fact, it is clear that BlackBerry has learned a good deal from their earlier outage as this time they seemed to have had an effective back-up in place that ensured no e-mails or text messages were lost. It might seem odd to claim and outage...Read more...
No, it wasn't a bad Windows Update patch that caused the massive Skype outage that started last Thursday and continued into the weekend. It was the semi-synchronized massive reboot across the globe, which exposed a bug in the Skype Code. On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical...Read more...
Skype isn’t commenting just yet on the major outage that has befallen the service. Since the trouble began, Skype has ceased allowing users to download the client while they iron out what is believed to be a software issue.The problem started late on the 15th, when both log-in and connectivity issues struck the Skype. Current estimates are...Read more...
In the immortal words of the late, great Kurt Cobain - all apologies... Sorry about the down time today folks. We had a drive array acting up but all seems resolved now. Cross your fingers the ghost has left the machine... Thanks!...Read more...