Posted in
Outages on November 11th, 2008 by Pingdom
The BBC website was subjected to a DDoS attack on Thursday evening (November 6) that crippled the website’s performance significantly.
During the attack, the BBC website responded very slowly, and our monitoring shows that for a total of 1 hour and 15 minutes it did not respond at all. The downtime was spread over multiple short intervals, lasting just a few minutes each time.
The attack lasted the entire evening. It started to have an effect after 5 p.m. CET and the performance was not back to normal until after 10 p.m. CET.
Analyzing the response times of the website clearly shows the effect the DDoS attack had on the performance of the BBC website. The diagram below shows the hourly average load time of the HTML page (just the HTML page, without any images, external scripts, etc).
The faster load times after 10 p.m. are most likely due to the fact that BBC put up a simplified version of the web page during the attack to better handle the increased load. The simplified page was left in place overnight in case the attack would resume.
All monitoring data in this article is taken from the Pingdom uptime monitoring service.
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Posted in
Main on February 7th, 2012 by Pingdom
In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.
But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.
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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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