We all enjoy taking a late morning and some extra sleep now and then, but usually we want to do it on purpose. A large number of Swedish iPhone owners who use their iPhone as an alarm clock got an unexpectedly late start this morning when it turned out that their iPhone’s clock was running two hours behind.

The culprit apparently was the time synchronization server of their Swedish phone operator, which the iPhone synchronizes its clock against.

The time shift occurred this morning between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m. local time. Not all users were affected, but enough to make the Swedish news. (Swedish blogger Joakim Jardenberg first broke the news.)

Updated reports say not only iPhone users were affected but also other phones that used the operator’s time synchronization servers, including Android phones. Apparently the wrong time zone was broadcasted to all phones which had automatic time synchronization activated. The sudden time change was triggered by planned maintenance work (but obviously shifting the time zone was not intentional).

Judging by the comments we’ve seen there were a number of people who were late dropping off the kids and going to work this morning. Hopefully no one missed a flight.

Fortunately – or unfortunately for the most prominent sleepyheads here at the office – we at Pingdom weren’t affected and were here on time this morning. (An hour or two of extra sleep would have been nice… ).

Now imagine this happening with AT&T in the US and its much larger user base.

It may be the start of a new trend, software that automatically upgrades itself silently in the background without ever bothering users. Google has been doing it successfully with its Chrome web browser, and soon Mozilla will jump on the bandwagon with Firefox.

You may love it or hate it, but for most users, software that automatically upgrades itself can be a blessing, and in more ways than is immediately apparent.

And it’s not just great for users, it’s great for developers because it allows them to innovate and develop at a fast pace, pushing out frequent updates without annoying their users with upgrade notices. In short, automatic upgrades let developers push the pace of innovation.

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The two mobile platforms with the most apps are Google’s Android with around 95,000 apps, and Apple’s iOS with around 250,000 apps.

Those are impressive numbers, but this article isn’t about the sheer number of apps available. Instead, we wanted to focus on a very interesting distinction between the two platforms: The radical difference in the ratio between free and paid apps.

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Do you run a web service or hosting company? Do you like transparency? Then this might be of interest to you.

Service status blogs are becoming increasingly common these days and are usually very appreciated by users. Look no further than Twitter’s famous status blog, or the Google Apps status page. Status blogs (or “status pages”, depending on approach) may look and work differently, but they all serve the same purpose, informing users about service issues.

Now it’s easier than ever before if you want one, or want to make your existing status blog even better.

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From its official launch in October 2009, it took Windows 7 only nine months to pass Vista. Now the next question is when it will catch up with Windows XP. Because, unbelievable as it may seem, Windows XP still has a massive 55% of the desktop OS market. That is more than Windows 7 and Vista combined.

To figure out when Windows 7 will overtake XP, we have made a prediction based on the average market share changes over the past six months. It will give us an idea of what will happen if things continue at their current pace.

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Although the growth of Firefox has stagnated a bit lately due to the increasing competition from rival browsers, it’s still one of the biggest success stories in the history of the Internet and has the second-largest user base of any web browser.

Firefox has a widespread global user base, but we wanted to find out where it is most common, or another way of looking at it: how are the Firefox users distributed?

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