The popular bookmarking service Delicious has been having problems for several hours this morning, European time. A lot of people use the service for tagging and keeping track of bookmarked web pages, and use it instead of their browser’s built-in bookmark functionality. With the service unavailable, their bookmarks were missing in action.

People were of course quick to comment:

Delicious has publicly acknowledged the problem on Twitter, saying that they are working on solving the issue:

Slowdown started just after 7 a.m.

Our own data from Pingdom (our uptime monitoring service) shows that the site started having problems just after 7 a.m. CET, and was therefore most noticeable to European users where the day was just starting.

The site seems to have been experienced extreme slowdown, making connections to it either time out or being refused entirely. Even when the page could be loaded it took an exceeding amount of time to just load the HTML part of the page, as seen in the diagram we have included here below (a screenshot from a Pingdom response time report).

Note that these are hourly averages, but tests were performed every minute. Instances where the page took more than 20 seconds to load were common during this period.

As of this writing, the service seems to be back up, after just under three hours of problems.

Update: Correction, the site is still having issues as of 11:47 a.m. CET.

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