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 February 8th, 2010 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Main on February 5th, 2010 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Pingdom on February 4th, 2010 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Main on February 1st, 2010 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Main on January 29th, 2010 by Pingdom
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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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.