Posted in
Outages on September 30th, 2008 by Pingdom
On Monday, the US House of Representatives rejected a $700 billion emergency package for the US financial system. After the bill was rejected, the House website was so overwhelmed with visitors seeking information or wanting to email their representatives that the whole website effectively crashed.
“We haven’t seen this much demand since the 9-11 commission report was posted on the site in 2004,” said Jeff Ventura, spokesman for the House Chief Administrative Officer. “We’re being overwhelmed with Web traffic about the bill.”
The slowdown affected all House-member websites since they are all tied into one system.
Rich Miller over at Data Center Knowledge wrote on Monday that when he tried accessing the website, it took about two minutes to load, and loaded without style sheets.
Today, Tuesday, the website seems to be back to normal.
AP via Data Center Knowledge.
Want to test your site every minute?
Posted in
Main on March 17th, 2010 by Pingdom
Have you ever wondered how much money Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and other tech giants have in the bank? What kind of assets do they have, how much spending money do they have? The vague answer is, “a lot.” But if you want to find out exactly how much, read on.
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Posted in
Main on March 12th, 2010 by Pingdom
Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.
But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.
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Posted in
Main on March 10th, 2010 by Pingdom
What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?
The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.
These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.
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Posted in
Main on March 5th, 2010 by Pingdom
We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.
Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.
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Posted in
Main on March 4th, 2010 by Pingdom
Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.
And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.
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Svetlana Gladkova
September 30th, 2008 at 5:50 am
How comes you use “took down” in the title when it was about slowdown mostly with some people unable to access because of server timeout, I believe, not actual downtime.
Pingdom
September 30th, 2008 at 6:15 am
@Svetlana: Thanks for commenting.
The reason we wrote “took down” is that if a website takes extremely long to load it is in all practicality down. How many would wait two minutes (and for an incomplete page) like Rich Miller did?
We should add that most web browsers time out if they can’t get a response from the web server in 15 seconds.
j mikow
September 30th, 2008 at 10:35 am
The site is still down for many members. The communication links with the financial services committee, the primary committee responsible for the bail out bill, is only partially functional and that includes the contact Email that is not owkring.
Buck McHugh
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Basically this bailout bill and a few interest rate cuts will at best postpone a train wreck in the equity markets. None the less, a train wreck is coming regardless of this infusion of funds in the short term. If panic sets in after the Fed runs out of ammunition and can not cut rates any further then we will see a crash in the stock market. If the stock market breaks down below 9500, we could test 2003 levels all over again. We are talking Dow 7500 folks. The other negative effect of this bill is that it will cause more debt burden on the tax payer and the Fed will print more money. This will in turn cause hyper-inflation and the dollar will crash relative to other major currencies like the euro and the yen. I am seriously worried about an economic melt down and possibly a depression. Comment by Buck McHugh former VP of Investments at A.G.Edwards and graduate of Cambridge University’s Judge Institute of Management Studies.
Liam Keyes
May 26th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
I find it interesting that Buck McHugh is putting his two cents in on this subject. Buck was never V.P. of Investments in AG Edwards. Furthermore, he resigned from that firm under pressure as the Secretary of States Office in Massachusetts was investigating him for scamming money from Retirees from the Former Boston Edison Company(now N-Star). He will never be allowed to work in Massachusetts in that field ever again.