If you missed that Google had a 2.5-hour Gmail outage yesterday, you were probably hiding under a rock, or possibly in one of those sensory deprivation chambers. Every major tech blog and news outlet was on it (not to mention Twitter users).

It was night-time in the US, which limited the impact there, but the rest of the world wasn’t so lucky. For example, in Europe the outage started at 9:30 in the morning.

Google has now put a number on how much the potential productivity loss for Gmail users was worth.

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There are now 177 million domain names across all top-level domains, which is an increase by 16% (24 million domain names) compared to a year ago.

These numbers are from the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, a quarterly report from Verisign about the growth of the domain name industry. Verisign has been doing this report a few years now, so we went back and looked at the data for 2006 and 2007 as well so we could show a wider time frame than just 2008 (to see trends, etc).

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When it comes to the ability to do damage to a company, few employees have more power than sysadmins. Deep system access and inside knowledge is a necessary part of their job, but when things go bad between employee and employer, some very sensitive situations can arise.

Here are six real-world cases of “sysadmins gone wild” that all ended up in court.

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Yesterday we released a big, brand new report about social network site uptime in 2008.

Included in the report are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Friendster, LiveJournal, Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, Windows Live Spaces, Last.fm, Classmates.com, Reunion.com, Xanga and Imeem.

The full report is available as a free PDF, but we have lifted out some interesting data from the report here below.

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The people behind the Wordpress.com blogging service recently shared some technical information about their new data center in Chicago, which is located in a Layered Technologies facility.

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You may remember the incident that Google had on January 31, when it during 55 minutes accidentally flagged all URL:s containing “/” as a potential malware site. This meant that every single site on the Internet was marked as harmful, including Google.com.

This is a look at some interesting side effects of that incident.

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Symmetry and asymmetry, structure and detailed designs. Are we talking about art? In this case, no, we’re talking about silicon chips, integrated circuits and electronics. Look at these close-ups and macro shots, and you’ll see why sometimes they could just as well be considered art.

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If you’re not used to thinking in terms of website availability and reliability, we hope that the insights below may help you to a greater understanding of the factors you should keep in mind when selecting a quality hosting company.

Considering that we specialize in website and server monitoring, we tend to think about these issues all day long, all year long. Several people here at Pingdom also have plenty of experience from having worked in the web hosting industry. This means that we have both the insider’s and outsider’s perspective on web hosting, so we figured we were in a good position to share some insights about web hosting that many people aren’t aware of.

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The ever-popular Slashdot was unreachable for over an hour last evening due to massive amounts of traffic hitting its network. Normally Slashdot is known for bringing other sites down with the traffic it generates (the so-called Slashdot effect, or slashdotting).

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We thought it was time for some fun of the geekier kind. If you know what IPv6 is, this should be something for you.

You may have seen IPv6 addresses that contain a couple of actual words. Here is a made-up example: babe:f432:42aa:8271:eee6:1076:dead:beef

Now what if we take this one step further, and construct entire sentences inside IPv6 addresses instead of just a few words? We decided to do just that, and here is how we did it.

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