The social network site LinkedIn had two hour-long outages last week, one on Thursday and one on Sunday.

The first outage

The first outage, on November 13 at 10:06 p.m. EST, lasted 1 hour and five minutes. According to a message displayed on the website the downtime was due to planned maintenance.

During this time, the website returned a HTTP 500 server error (meaning “internal server error”) and a page with the message, “LinkedIn is currently unavailable while we make upgrades to improve our service to you. We’ll return around 8:00pm (PT) November 13th, 2008.”

The second outage

The second outage, on November 16 at 02:21 a.m. EST, lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes.

The reason for this second period of downtime is unclear since the website did not respond at all. All connections timed out. This could have been due to a network error or some other internal problem at LinkedIn, or it was indeed due to more maintenance (although without a status page available to the public). If anyone knows what happened, please let us know in the comments.

So far in 2008…

We have written about LinkedIn’s occasional availability issues in the past. So far in 2008, the LinkedIn website has had a total of 37 hours of downtime, the equivalent of 99.52% uptime.

The data in this article comes from Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service.

There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.

So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.

Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.

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Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!

For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

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Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

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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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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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