We may be screwing up Mother Nature, but she is getting back at us in her own way. And she knows we love electricity and the Internet.

Though a lot of outages are man-made, there are a huge amount of power outages directly caused by nature every year. Causes include storms and hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding, and more often than not, animals too curious for their own best.

We had a look at some of the nature-made power outages so far in 2008, focusing mostly on the United States and North America, and how power outages have affected data centers and ISPs.

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Wikipedia, the über-popular online encyclopedia, went down briefly today. It was unavailable for about 15 minutes, starting at 11:17 CET according to our Pingdom monitoring.

The service was responding with HTTP error 503 (service unavailable) and displayed an error page stating that the Wikimedia servers were experiencing a technical problem (screenshot below).

Wikimedia.org was also down, indicating that Wikimedia had some form of general problem that likely affected all its websites, not just Wikipedia.

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ZDNet has posted a short walkthrough of HP’s portable data center, POD, which we assume is set to compete with other container data centers from for example Sun and Rackable.

Want one? It’ll only cost you just over $1 million. Without servers.

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Google has so many different products that it becomes pretty hard to keep track of them over time. Some are worth being reminded of, though, because there are several useful Google products that are flying below the radar, unknown to the vast majority of users out there.

How do we know this? A couple of weeks ago we here at Pingdom wrote about Google’s tendency to keep many of its products in perpetual beta, and while doing the research for that post we kept finding Google products that we either didn’t know about or had forgotten that they existed.

So, we decided to share these with you.

This post lists 10 interesting Google products that you are likely to either have forgotten about or simply never knew existed.

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Aptimize has released a product called Runtime Page Optimizer. The software runs on your webserver and applies performance optimizations to pages before they are delivered to the browser.

Aptimize uses many of the optimizations that Steve Souders describes in his book High Performance Web Sites and the best practices from YSlow.

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Spam can be more than a mere inconvenience, as tens of thousands of Virgin Media DSL customers in the UK can testify to after having been unable to access their email for days last week due to what is said to have been a spam attack. Virgin Media uses Tucows’s OpenSRS email service.

The Virgin Media DSL service has about 200,000 customers. Approximately half of these were affected.

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OpenOffice.org, the open source office suite, launched version 3.0 yesterday. The demand for the new version seems to have taken OpenOffice.org off guard because their website hasn’t been able to handle the load, as has been reported from several places around the Web.

In the meantime, OpenOffice.org has put up a simplified static page with download links, but even that hasn’t been enough to ensure the website’s stability. As of this writing, the website fails to load, though we managed to access it earlier to take the screenshot you see below.

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Tomorrow, on October 14, Apple will hold a press event where the “spotlight turns to notebooks.” As usual there have been lots of speculation and rumors about what new products Apple will be announcing, but we won’t list all the rumors here since they can be found elsewhere.

However, we thought this would be a good time to remind all Apple fans of our Apple Store status widgets that checks if the Apple Store is up or not. If Apple does what they usually do, they will take down the Apple Store for a while before opening it again updated with the new products.

There are two widgets, one you can include on your website and one you can run on your OS X desktop.

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Early on Friday (Oct 10) a power outage hit the Novell office and data center in Nürnberg, Germany, effectively taking down several services used by the popular Linux distribution OpenSUSE, including the download redirector (used for downloads and software updates if we understand it correctly) and the mailing lists.

Though the building had two power lines, both failed, and the power company had to dig up the cables to repair them.

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LinkedIn, the popular social network for professionals, has had several periods of downtime lately. The last one came last evening (US time), and lasted just over an hour.

The website’s recurring availability issues are making us wonder if LinkedIn has perhaps started to run into scaling issues. According to their website, LinkedIn currently has more than 25 million users, compared to 14 million a year ago. That’s almost a doubling of their user base in just a year.

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