This is a weekly recurring post about noteworthy incidents on the Internet. 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.

As you perhaps noticed we didn’t have a summary post last week (due to time constraints here at Pingdom), so this time we will cover the last two weeks.

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 November 24 – December 7:

• Free offer takes down Dr. Pepper website: If you decide to offer everyone in America a free soda and make the offer last just one day, and direct everyone to your website, you’re asking for trouble. This is exactly what Dr. Pepper did. (This happened on November 23, but we included it here anyway because we thought it was really interesting.)
• Black Friday knocks out Sears.com: Though several online retailers had trouble with their websites, none had more trouble than Sears.com on Black Friday (Nov. 28), forcing the site to put up a maintenance page large parts of the day. StorefrontBacktalk has a nice summary of the incidents on Black Friday.
• Cyber Monday crashed GAP.com: Just as on Black Friday, Cyber Monday (Dec. 1) brought its share of performance issues and outages to online retailers. The standout this day was GAP.com, which went down early in the day (though their problems were not quite as lengthy as those Sears experienced on Black Friday). Again, StorefrontBacktalk has a nice summary of the incidents on Cyber Monday.
• Black Friday / Cyber Monday discussion: For those interested, there is a 30-minute podcast (MP3 link is at the bottom of that article) where Evan Schuman at StorefrontBacktalk leads a roundtable with Pingdom, Keynote, Gomez and Sitemorse to discuss the incidents and challenges that face the websites of online retailers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (and other peak traffic periods).
• Wikia Search website trouble: Between December 1 and December 3, the Wikia Search website had severe performance issues, where one in three requests were met with a “service unavailable” message.
• Technorati blocks out the Internet: Technorati (mistakenly, we assume) refused access to all visitors for close to one hour on December 4, just responding with the standard Apache error message, “You don’t have permission to access / on this server”.

That’s it for this time! If you see anything you would like us to include in next week’s summary, 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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