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 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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Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2012 by Pingdom
As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.
Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.
What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.
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Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2012 by Pingdom
Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h
This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.
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Posted in
Main on February 2nd, 2012 by Pingdom
Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.
Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.
We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.
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Posted in
Main,
Mobile podcast on February 2nd, 2012 by Pingdom
Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.
In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.
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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.
Kelso
August 1st, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Wow that is very crazy.. do you think that cloud computing could have solved this? (Scalability)