Today we are starting a new, weekly recurring post that we hope you will find useful. The purpose of this weekly post is, as the title implies, to sum up some of the more noteworthy problems that have occurred on the Internet during the past week. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.

We are not going to be able to cover everything that happens out there, so if we omit anything that you feel is important, please feel free to add this information in the comments, preferably with a link to a source (such as a news article or service status page with relevant information).

Incidents between October 27 – November 2:

• WordPress.com: The WordPress.com blog platform (hosting more than 4.5 million blogs and not to be confused with the WordPress blog software) was subjected to a DDoS attack on October 27 that caused some of its blogs to become unavailable for a period of time. WordPress.com has three data centers and was able to reroute the relevant traffic to unaffected servers once the DDoS attack had been identified and isolated.
• Match.com: The dating website Match.com experienced technical difficulties and was unavailable for more than an hour and a half on October 29.
• Cogent vs. Sprint: October 30 saw the start of another peering dispute involving Cogent, this time with Sprint. The Renesys blog has a detailed account of the effects of the disconnect, which affected for example Expedia and Pfizer. As of November 2, Cogent and Sprint have resumed the peering connection, at least for now. You may recall that Cogent has been involved in several peering disputes in the past, for example with Telia.
• Baidu: Baidu, China’s own Google, was unreachable from North America and Europe (and probably the rest of the world as well) for more than eight hours on October 30, possibly because of the Great Firewall of China.

That’s it for this time! As already mentioned, we will keep doing this once a week, so if you see anything you would like us to include, please send us a tip.

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

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The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

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Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

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, security, and other geeky topics.

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

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