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 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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