The technological world we live in is often more sensitive to disruptions than people care to admit. We have often written about various kinds of incidents and outages on the Internet, as well as the occasional blackout and software bug. After all, via our uptime monitoring service we deal with downtime-related issues every single day, so it’s a fascinating subject to us.

This is a set of articles that all show Murphy’s Law in action. If things can go wrong, they will. Pretty much nothing is safe from Mr. Murphy…

Mother nature (and trucks) on the attack

• Outages caused by raccoons, thieves and random gunfire – Power outages are a frequent cause of data center trouble and other service interruptions. We decided to search the news for various causes of power and network outages, and came back with some rather unusual results. Listed here are some of the ones we found for a single week. It really seems like almost anything can happen.
• Kamikaze squirrels kill electricity, over and over again – Next time your home or office has a blackout, there’s a good chance you can blame a squirrel. Tens of thousands of outages are caused every year by suicidal squirrels being where they shouldn’t be.
• Mother Nature’s assault on electricity and the Internet – We may be screwing up Mother Nature, but she is getting back at us in her own way. And she knows we love electricity and the Internet. Though a lot of outages are man-made, there are a huge amount of power outages directly caused by nature every year. Causes include storms and hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding, and more often than not, animals too curious for their own best. These are some examples from 2008.

Internet incidents

• The major incidents on the Internet in 2007 – We gathered 13 of the most notable Internet-related outages and incidents that happened in 2007. Why 13? Though you usually can’t blame downtime on bad luck, we thought it was an appropriate number for a collection like this.
• The major Internet outages so far in 2008 – The first few months of 2008 were quite eventful on the Internet when it comes to incidents and outages for various services. This is a summary of some of the major ones from the beginning of 2008. For the full year, see the one below.
• The major incidents on the Internet in 2008 – We have gathered 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet in 2008. This was another eventful year, full of its share of accidents and incidents that disrupted the Internet and the WWW. We have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. You are sure to recognize several of them.
• Conflicting opinions causing DDoS blitzkriegs online – Sometimes disagreements and conflicts spill over from real life to online, and sometimes people go completely overboard and launch cyber attacks on services or websites they dislike, doing their best to sabotage them and often causing some serious downtime. This article takes a look at some high-profile examples of cyber attacks.

Serious software bugs and system problems

• When trading stops: Major stock exchange outages this decade – The recent world-wide financial chaos has reminded us how sensitive the stock market is, with sharp up- and downturns. Now imagine the reaction of the stock traders if they couldn’t trade at all. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. We have gathered up some of the major stock exchange outages that have occurred so far this decade (i.e. since 2000 and onward) and listed when and why they happened.
• 10 historical software bugs with extreme consequences – This article is about some of the more dire consequences of software errors through the years. Incidents that make recent Gmail outages seem rather trivial.

We hope you found these articles interesting. Thanks for taking the time to read this far!

Photo by TangoPango.

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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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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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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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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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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