Posted in
Main on November 13th, 2007 by Pingdom
Rackspace, known for its 100% uptime guarantee, had problems last night when servers in their Dallas data center had to be taken offline for a couple of hours.
The reason for the outage was a car accident where a truck drove into a power transformer, which exploded. This caused a major power disruption.
When Rackspace’s backup power kicked in, two chillers failed to start. To prevent overheating, Rackspace took a number of servers offline, including servers for 37signals, GigaOM, WebmasterWorld and LaughingSquid.
Om Malik, editor of GigaOM, one of the affected sites, made the following observation:
Everything seems to be back to normal, but it leaves me with one simple observation: our Internet infrastructure despite all the talk is fragile as a fine porcelain cup on the roof of a car zipping across a pot-holed goat track. A single truck driver can take out sites like 37Signals out in a snap.
In other words: Murphy’s Law in action.
Read more about the outage:
TechCrunch, GigaOM, Data Center Knowledge, Valleywag, 37signals
Rackspace announcement
Webmasterworld uptime, November.
Want to test your site every minute?
Posted in
Main on February 9th, 2012 by Pingdom
There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.
So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.
Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.
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Posted in
Main on February 8th, 2012 by Pingdom
Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!
For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.
Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.
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Posted in
Main on February 8th, 2012 by Pingdom
Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.
As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.
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Posted in
Main on February 7th, 2012 by Pingdom
In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.
But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.
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Posted in
Main on February 6th, 2012 by Pingdom
The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.
As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.
It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.
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