This week yet another interesting downtime was detected by the GIGRIB network. Lycos, the search-engine-turned-portal, was unavailable for more than seven hours earlier this week. Not only that, Tripod and Angelfire, the two free Web hosting services provided by Lycos, were also down for that duration. According to this Computer Weekly article, Lycos’ hosting provider Savvis was the culprit.

Other popular community sites such as Digg and Google’s Orkut have also had recent downtimes detected by GIGRIB, as covered by TechCrunch (Digg downtime and Orkut downtime).

That just goes to show that no matter how big you are, problems can come your way when you least expect it.

Want exact downtimes? You can find them on the GIGRIB downtime report pages for Lycos, Angelfire, Tripod, Digg and Orkut.

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

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Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

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Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

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The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

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