We see this happening a lot. It may sound like a luxury problem (wow, too many users!), but think about it: If you’ve created something special and spent lots of effort building up expectations and buzz around your product, you don’t want anything to stand in the way of people finally trying it out, do you?

Here are some real-world launch troubles from 2008:

• Cuil - Before its launch, Cuil was hailed as a potential Google killer search engine. Once it launched, the site crashed due to excessive traffic. Ultimately, the product didn’t really deliver as promised, but their initial downtime certainly didn’t help matters.
• Europeana - This is a EU initiative to make a huge repository of documents and artwork from major European museums available online for anyone to view. When it launched, demand proved overwhelming (apparently reaching 10 million hits per hour) and the site was taken down and the re-launch delayed with over a month (it is now up in a limited-capacity beta).
• MS Photosynth - This 3D-from-2D-photos web app turned out to be more popular than Microsoft expected. Microsoft stated that “traffic has far exceeded even our most optimistic expectations” and started adding more hardware so their servers would stop failing.
• Apple MobileMe - MobileMe suffered from significant problems during its launch, and its reputation hasn’t fully recovered yet.
• New versions of Firefox, Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org - Mozilla had site issues due to the massive demand for the new Firefox 3, Ubuntu has had site issues several times in connection with launching new versions of Ubuntu, and when the new OpenOffice.org suite launched recently the website was so swamped with traffic that it had to keep a simple replacement page up for days.

Before we delve into how to deal with these kinds of website launch issues (and hopefully avoid them), let’s categorize the different kinds of product launches there are, since website downtime will affect them differently.

Service vs. downloadable, new vs. existing products

We have mentioned two kinds of products above:

• Online service/website: For these products it’s clear-cut. If the website doesn’t work, your product doesn’t work, so it’s essential that this doesn’t happen. Broken website = broken product.
• Downloadable product: These products will in many cases be relying on a website to start the download from. You need to keep this website operational to keep downloads going, or risk turning people away (some of them may never come back).

There is, aside from the division between downloadable software products and online services, another fundamental difference to keep in mind, which affects how easy it is to estimate future traffic demands:

• New versions of existing products: A website with an existing product will have an easier time estimating what kind of traffic levels they are likely to reach when a new version is launched. The product has already been live for some time so past traffic levels are known and can be used to estimate future ones (and there have been other product launches to learn from).
• Completely new products: A website with a completely new product will have a much harder time estimating the initial demand. You can have an idea from the buzz surrounding your product before it launches (in forums, on blogs, etc), but it will be a guesstimate at best. Incorrectly estimating the demand can very easily happen, especially if your product ends up being featured on some popular websites that you hadn’t counted on.

And now just one more thing before we head on to the potential solutions to the launch crash dilemma.

Playing the Devil’s advocate - Are launch crashes good for you?

Some of you may ask yourselves, well, these sites that go down, they often end up getting press. The more the product has been hyped beforehand, the more people write about how it crashed on launch day due to “overwhelming demand”. Perhaps this is a good thing and will give the product some extra attention?

While it’s likely that this has been used as a marketing trick on some occasions, we believe it’s short-sighted and should be avoided. Uptime and reliability are important issues for all kinds of SaaS products, and you don’t want to put that blemish on your reputation the first thing you do.

So don’t do it. Make a professional first impression.

Some ways around the launch scalability problem

Aside from scaling up your site permanently to always be able to handle the traffic spikes you may experience during the launch (which would be ideal, of course, but not everyone can afford this), here are some alternative solutions to handle launch traffic spikes:

• Trickle launch, i.e. use invites over time to restrict usage and traffic (example of sites that are using/have used this approach are Spotify and Gmail). This can also be combined with marketing, making it feel “exclusive”. This is a good approach for online services (SaaS) since they can control their growth this way.
• Use mirrors. For downloadable software product launches, provide download mirrors to offload your main website.
• Simplified homepage. You can expect that most people will just type in your regular URL first, so on launch day you may want to have a special, light version of the homepage ready (preferably a static one). This may not be possible for web services, but for sites offering a software download it can be helpful.
• Temporary extra capacity. Temporarily lease extra capacity, for example via a CDN, or have some extra servers (and bandwidth) ready.
• Identify your bottlenecks. While not a solution in itself, try doing as much load testing as you can beforehand to get an idea what your current system can handle. How much load is your database handling? What is the load on your web server(s)? Which are the main bottlenecks in your system? Identifying factors such as these will help you add capacity (or optimize the system) in an efficient manner.

Ideally, we would all be using automagically scaling cloud hosting solutions, but we’re not quite there yet.

Do you have additional tips to share? What do you do to handle extreme traffic spikes to your site? Let us know in the comments!

Image from 2theadvocate.com.

Since 2002, Google has honored 25 historical people with custom-made versions of the Google logo, displayed for one day on the Google homepage.

Judging by the people Google have selected so far, don’t expect any WWF wrestling stars to show up anytime soon. It’s an elite collection of highly influential scientists, artist and architects who have made their mark on human history and culture.

Here they are, all 25 of them, in reverse chronological order.

René Magritte

(1898 - 1967) Belgian surrealist artist, famous for his often witty and amusing images.

Shown on the Google homepage on November 21, 2008.

Marc Chagall

(1887 - 1985) Russian Jewish modernist artist. He was a pioneer of modernism and one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century.

Shown on the Google homepage on July 7, 2008.

Diego Velázquez

(1599 - 1660) Spanish painter and portrait artist, many of his famous paintings depicting scenes of historical and cultural significance, royalty and notable European figures of the time.

Shown on the Google homepage on June 6, 2008.

Walter Gropius

(1883 - 1969) German architect, founder of Bauhaus and a pioneer of modern architecture.

Shown on the Google homepage on May 18, 2008.

Alexander Graham Bell

(1847 - 1922) Scientist and inventor famous for, among other things, inventing the telephone.

Shown on the Google homepage on March 3, 2008.

Luciano Pavarotti

(1935 - 2007) Italian opera singer, part of “The Three Tenors” and one of the world’s most famous vocal artists.

Shown on the Google homepage on October 12, 2007.

Yuri Gagarin

(1934 - 1968) Soviet cosmonaut who was the first man in space and the first to orbit Earth.

Shown on the Google homepage on April 12, 2007.

Edvard Munch

(1863 - 1944) Norwegian symbolist painter, known for his expressionistic art. His painting The Scream is one of the most recognizable in all art (and indeed the one Google used as basis for the themed logo).

Shown on the Google homepage on December 12, 2006.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

(1859 - 1930) British author mostly known for his novels about Sherlock Holmes, one of the most famous fictional characters of all time.

Shown on the Google homepage on May 22, 2006.

Percival Lowell

(1855 - 1916) American astronomer (among other things) famous for his study of Mars and founder of the Lowell Observatory, which after his death discovered Pluto.

Shown on the Google homepage on March 13, 2006.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

(1756 - 1791) Austrian musical prodigy and one of the most popular classical composers of all time.

Shown on the Google homepage on January 27, 2006.

Martin Luther King Jr.

(1929 - 1968) African American minister, probably most famous for his work against racial segregation and discrimination, which also earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Shown on the Google homepage on January 16, 2006. Google has a themed logo every Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Louis Braille

(1809 - 1852) The inventor of braille, a widely used reading and writing system for the blind and visually impaired (he was blind himself).

Shown on the Google homepage on January 4, 2006.

Frank Lloyd Wright

(1867 - 1959) American architect and interior designer. The American Institute of Architecture has named him “the greatest American architect of all time”.

Shown on the Google homepage on June 8, 2005.

Leonardo da Vinci

(1452 - 1519) Italian polymath, doing groundbreaking work as a scientist, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter and more. Often described the archetypal Renaissance man and one of the most widely talented people of all time.

Shown on the Google homepage on April 15, 2005.

Vincent van Gogh

(1853 - 1890) Dutch Post-Impressionist artist and a pioneer of Expressionism. And yes, he’s the one who cut off part of his own ear.

Shown on the Google homepage on March 30, 2005.

Ray Charles

(1930 - 2004) American pianist and soul singer. Rolling Stone magazine ranked him as number two on its list of the 100 greatest singers of all time.

Shown on the Google homepage on September 23, 2004.

Gaston Julia

(1893 - 1978) French mathematician who devised the formula for the Julia set, common for generating fractals.

Shown on the Google homepage on February 3, 2004.

Alfred Hitchcock

(1899 - 1980) British film director and producer, a pioneer of the suspense and psychological thriller genres. He is one of the best-known filmmakers of all time.

Shown on the Google homepage on August 13, 2003.

M. C. Escher

(1898 - 1972) Dutch graphic artist, famous for his mathematically inspired images of impossible constructions and geometric figures.

Shown on the Google homepage on June 16, 2003.

Albert Einstein

(1879 - 1955) German theoretical physicist, best known for his theory of relativity but contributed greatly to multiple fields within physics, for which he also received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He is regarded as one of the most influential people in human history.

Shown on the Google homepage on March 14, 2003.

Michelangelo

(1475 - 1564) Italian painter, sculptor, architect and engineer. Together with Leonardo da Vinci, he is often cited as the archetypal Renaissance man.

Shown on the Google homepage on March 6, 2003.

Pablo Picasso

(1881 - 1973) Andalusian-Spanish painter and sculptor. Famous for (among other things) founding the Cubist movement. He also has one of the longest full names we’ve ever seen. Try this on for size: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso.

Shown on the Google homepage on October 25, 2002.

Andy Warhol

(1928 - 1987) American artist and illustrator and a well-known figure in the Pop Art movement. In addition to his many works of art, he is also famous for being the originator of the concept of “15 minutes of fame”.

Shown on the Google homepage on August 6, 2002.

Piet Mondrian

(1872 - 1944) Dutch painter and an important contributor to the abstract De Stijl art movement.

Shown on the Google homepage on March 7, 2002.

Now, one wonders, who’s next in line to get his/her own Google logo? Any ideas?

Image source: Google.

WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization (an agency of the UN), has an arbitration and mediation center for domain disputes, and they continually publish the results of these disputes, as well as related facts and figures.

Some initial observations of what we have learned by studying the WIPO domain dispute data:

• Domain disputes are steadily increasing. They have doubled since 2003 (before that, disputes were actually decreasing).
• It pays to complain. 85% of domain disputes are judged in favor of the complainant.
• The United States is the origin of the most domain disputes by far, both for defendants and complainants. 40% of the defendants are US-based, which is a lot considering that the US only has 15% of the world Internet population.

We have summarized some of the most interesting parts of the WIPO data in this article, and we have also tried to figure out the underlying reason for the increase in domain disputes. Well, at least we have a pretty good theory involving Google AdSense…

Domain name disputes per year

It is interesting to note that domain disputes were decreasing between 2000 and 2003, but then started increasing again. The number of disputes has more than doubled in the period between 2003 and 2008. Each dispute/case often involves more than one domain name.

Dispute outcomes

The numbers from WIPO show that complainants win in 85% of the cases. This number has remained consistent through the years.

When a domain dispute is won, the domain name is usually transferred over to the complainant, or in some cases simply cancelled.

Top 10 countries involved in disputes

There are approximately 220 million Internet users in the United States, which is 15% of the world’s Internet population. Therefore it is interesting that they are behind a full 40% of the domain name disputes in the world (as defendants, i.e. the person or company being accused), as shown in the second table below.

A couple of real-world examples

WIPO lists all decided cases on their website. Looking through them, you can see which domain names have been involved, and it’s very obvious that the vast majority of the complaints involve trademark infringement, often involving misspelled versions of popular websites (supposedly for typo-squatting purposes).

Here are a couple of examples of cases we found:

• Typo squatting: Yahoo has been a complainant in a number of cases involving a large number of typo variants of geocities.com (owned by Yahoo) and the yahoo.com domain name, such as goecities.com and yyahoo.com. (One case example here.)
• Trademark infringement: An example we looked at involved Godaddy, where someone had registered a number of Godaddy-flavored domain names such as godaddythis.com and godaddythat.com and other similar domain names.

In both of the cases we mentioned above the result was that the domain names were transferred to the complainant (Yahoo and Godaddy).

Top 10 categories for complaints

Both the above example were from the Internet industry, but contrary to what you might think, IT and Internet is not the most targeted market at all, as you can see here below. That honor goes to Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals.

Did Google AdSense trigger the increase in domain name disputes?

Domain name speculation can involve a lot of money, and that may be a factor (increased speculation leading to increased disputes), but the shift seen in 2003 seems to indicate that something or someone fundamentally changed the rules of the game that year. That someone (although hardly intentionally) was Google.

Google launched AdSense in mid-2003. Suddenly it was possible for websites to easily display text ads from Google as a way to earn money. AdSense ads paid relatively well, so type-in traffic to parked pages became more profitable.

We suspect that the introduction of AdSense, combined with practices such as domain tasting and typo squatting, has greatly contributed to the increasing number of domain name disputes.

A question remains, though. Why was the number of cases going DOWN before then? Was it a side effect of the general dotcom bubble bursting?

What do YOU think?

Your insights and speculations regarding domain disputes would be highly welcome, so please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us in the comments.

Data source:
WIPO domain name dispute statistics

Exhibit A: Yahoo Geocities, the American version

Geocities.yahoo.com

Exhibit B: Yahoo Geocities, the Japanese version

Geocities.yahoo.co.jp

A slightly different approach, wouldn’t you say?

This is kind of related to a post we made about the approach to web design used by Asian web hosting companies, where you can check out a number of interesting screenshots and observations.

First of all, a big thank you to all our readers. We hope we have been able to provide you with interesting, fun and thought-provoking articles over the past year, and if you have discovered this blog recently, thank you for joining our ranks!

We have published more than 200 posts in 2008. Since we won’t be updating the blog until next Monday (December 29), here is a selection of our very best and most popular posts from 2008 to keep you entertained in the meantime. They are listed below in chronological order (starting with posts from last January).

Happy Holidays everyone, and we’ll see you back here next week! Thank you for reading!

(To read an article, just click on its headline.)

Web hosting names that make you go “Huh?”

There are a lot of web hosting companies out there with unusual, strange, or just plain weird names (and URLs). We collected some of the strangest ones in this post, and even more were added in the comments by our readers.

The state of Linux according to Google

This is a look at the state of Linux through the eyes of Google Trends, Google’s highly useful search trend analyzer, comparing distributions, desktop environments and more.

When data center cabling becomes art

We have posted pics of some truly messy data center cabling in the past, but this time we figured it was time to do the opposite: Show how some people have managed to organize cables into something close to art.

The seven largest Open Source deals ever

In light of the billion-dollar MySQL acquisition, we decided to find the largest deals in open source history. A lot of open source companies have been bought in the last couple of years, with hundreds of millions of dollars trading places in the process.

Web hosting now vs 10 years ago

It’s no secret that there has been an on-going war over customers in the web hosting industry for many years. Together with the technical evolution of computer hardware, this fierce competition has drastically increased what you get for your money when you buy a web hosting account. This post compares what web hosts are offering now with what they did 10 years ago. The difference is startling.

When geeks and graffiti combine

This is a geek graffiti collection with some really cool pictures from all around the world, all with some relation to IT or the Internet.

17 brilliant 404 pages and why they are cool

When you end up following a dead or incorrect link or mistype a URL, you are likely to end up on a 404 error page. It doesn’t have to be a bad experience, though. We prowled the Web for funny and original takes on this classic error page and ended up with 17 great examples.

How we got from 1 to 162 million websites on the Internet

We have come a long way since the first baby steps of the World Wide Web. Back in January of 1996 we had 100,000 websites, and if we go back to mid-1993 there were only a total of 130 websites. So how has the number of websites grown over time? Here is how we got from 1 to 162 million websites on the Internet.

The history of computer data storage, in pictures

Nowadays we are used to having hundreds of gigabytes of storage capacity in our computers. Even tiny MP3 players and other handheld devices usually have several gigabytes of storage. This was pure science fiction only a few decades ago. For example, the first hard disk drive to have gigabyte capacity was as big as a refrigerator, and that was in 1980. Not so long ago! This post is a is a look back at some interesting storage devices from the early computer era.

Map of all Google data center locations

When Data Center Knowledge published its “Google Data Center FAQ”, we used that information to construct a map with all current and under-construction Google data center locations that are known today.

Google domain names – the funny, strange and surprising

Google owns a whole bunch of domain names other than the obvious ones like google.com, blogger.com and gmail.com. We decided to find out which ones, with some truly surprising results.

What the inside of a container data center looks like

There has been a lot of talk about container data centers lately (sometimes also called modular data centers). Most of the time we are only presented with an image of a branded shipping container, but let’s face it, all the interesting stuff is on the inside!

Gallery of Network Operations Centers

A Network Operations Center rests at the heart of every telecom network or major data center, a place to keep an eye on everything. This is a set of pictures of different NOCs from telecom companies and data centers (and one content delivery network), some amazing, some more modest.

Smart and funny use of Google Adwords

Text ads can be smart, funny, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious when they show up in the wrong context. Let yourself be amused and/or inspired by this list of really funny and original text ads from Google Adwords.

IT posters to cover your empty walls

If you’re like us and have lots of empty wall space in your office you need to check out this list. We collected a list of posters that focus on interesting information rather than nice-looking sunsets. And of course all are computer and network related.

Javascript framework usage among top websites

Which Javascript frameworks are the most common? To answer that question, we examined a set of almost 200 popular websites to see if they use a Javascript framework, and in that case which one.

Women in Open Source

There are lots of women involved in Open Source, but for some reason men just seem to stick their nose out more and put themselves in positions where they are seen (and of course there are more of them). This post highlights some of the most influential women in Open Source.

Social network popularity around the world

With the help of Google data, we looked at 12 of the top social networks to answer a simple, but highly interesting question: Where are they the most popular?

New SSL policy in Firefox hurting tens of thousands of sites

With Firefox 3, Mozilla changed the way Firefox handles SSL certificates. This change could scare away visitors from tens of thousands of websites that have expired or self-signed SSL certificates.

Linux popularity across the globe

The Linux landscape is constantly changing and has a strong community of both developers and users. But where is Linux the most popular, and where are the different Linux distributions the most popular?

23 awesome license plates for computer geeks

We here at Pingdom are computer geeks, and proud of it. None of us have any geeky vanity plates (custom license plates) on our cars, though. But others have, and we love those. This post is a gallery of pictures of some of the coolest vanity plates we have ever seen, collected from around the Web.

The Web back in 1996-1997

Back in 1996 the Web was starting to gain some serious momentum, but it was still just a few years old. Now in 2008, looking 12 years back into the past of the Web can be a both nostalgic and entertaining experience.

Why is almost half of Google in beta?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a beta is “a nearly complete prototype of a product.” Google is known for keeping their products in beta (much) longer than most other companies. But exactly how many of their products are in beta? When we investigated this, it turned out that out of the 49 Google products we could find, 22 were in beta. That’s 45%!

10 amazingly alternative operating systems and what they could mean for the future

This post is about the desktop operating systems that fly under the radar of most people. We are definitely not talking about Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, or even BSD or Solaris. There are much less mainstream options out there for the OS-curious.

Blue Screen of Death in unexpected locations

The infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) probably hasn’t escaped the notice of anyone who has used a computer in the last decade or so. There is actually a ridiculous amount of BSOD photos to be found around the Web. And not just of PCs. As this post will show you, the blue error screen seems to show up everywhere, and often in highly unexpected locations.

A visual history of 11 successful blogs

Many of the blogs that have a huge following today go back to much more humble beginnings. This post is a look at how they got started and what they looked like in their early days, compared to today.

Load size analysis of the top 100 blogs

This report presents an analysis of 100 top blogs, picked from the Technorati top 100 list. For each of these blogs, the front page (homepage) has been analyzed to see how large its download size is and what contributes the most to this size.

How nine of the world’s largest tech companies got started

Many of today’s largest tech companies, such as Sony, Nokia, Samsung and IBM, have been around for a very long time (some since the 1800s). Their beginnings were often very humble, and it is fascinating to look back and see how they actually got started.

The world’s most super-designed data center – fit for a James Bond villain

This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. It looks like the secret HQ of a James Bond villain. And it’s real.

The history of PC hardware, in pictures

It’s easy to forget that PCs have only been around for a couple of decades, and initially were nowhere near the powerhouses we have on our desks today. For example, did you know that the first “portable” computer weighed 25 kg (55 lb) and cost close to $20,000, that the first laser printer was big enough to fill up most of a room, or that you basically had to build the first Apple computer yourself?

We hope you like this collection of posts. Happy reading!

Now embrace both your inner geek and your Christmas spirit, and keep scrolling down.

Christmas tree made entirely from old computer parts

Photo by Sunny Brook.

Got RAM?

Found at Mediatinker.

Best. Tree. Ever.

Photo by dragon caiman (Carlos).

The iTree

Photo by Metromorphosis.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and other things for your Xmas tree

Photo by Lei Shi.

Proof that Tux IS a star

Photo by Maya.

These lights are connected to a network monitoring system.

White lights = all ok. Red lights = network trouble.

Photo by Jonathan Gaynor.

Computer geek Xmas wreath

Photo by Yoshi.

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 2

Photo by mcr25823 (Michael).

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 3

Photo by Bruce Hartman.

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 4

From TeamDroid.

Going old-school: Punch-card wreath

Photo by Jerry Gilbert.

And let’s not forget DESSERT!

Gingerbread laptop

Found at Mediatinker.

Gingerbread motherboard

Found at Mediatinker.

What are you waiting for? There’s still time to add some computer hardware to your Christmas tree!

Geeky chaos disc

Photo by Phil Hawksworth.

Killer coding ninja monkeys DO exist

Photo by Adam Rifkin.

Fedora and Red Hat fan

Photo by Behdad Esfahbod.

Love of Creative Commons, and Star Wars

Photo by James Allenspach.

Stop laughing, computers are cool now

Photo by Velda.

Ars Technica reader?

Photo by esposj (Joe).

Another Linux fan

Photo by Bruno Santos.

Digg the geek skull, but don’t jinx it

Photo by Jason Wun.

Use Firefox, but don’t you dare to disco

Photo by William Lay.

Could this possibly belong to a blogger?

Photo by Raviraja.

Flickr and Technorati fan

Photo by pixelm (Dan).

Squids meet web hosting

Photo by CarrieLu.

My other computer is a data center

Photo by Geoff Stearns.

And when things go completely overboard…

Photo by Neil Crosby.

What about your own laptop? Do you have a tendency to go overboard? Feel free to link to pictures in the comments!

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.

Let’s get right to it!

Mediterranean submarine cable cuts

In January, a pair of cut submarine telecom cables in the Mediterranean just north of Egypt caused severe Internet outages and disruptions in the Middle East, Pakistan and India. This incident reminded us all how dependent we are on the actual cabling that interconnects the various networks that make up the Internet. Further cable cuts in the same region followed, sparking various conspiracy theories.

The YouTube IP hijacking

This may very well be the most bizarre incident of the year. YouTube was completely unavailable for roughly two hours because an ISP, Pakistan Telecom, had mistakenly claimed their IP address space (including the IP addresses used by YouTube’s DNS servers). This effectively took YouTube offline in a matter of minutes. This proved that a single ISP can, under some circumstances, inadvertently sabotage parts of the entire Internet.

Explosion and fire at The Planet data center

Probably the most massive data center outage of the year happened in June, when an explosion and electrical fire in one of The Planet’s data centers in Houston affected thousands of sites (around 9,000 servers), some for several days. The fire department’s initial refusal to let The Planet activate its backup power generators didn’t exactly help. In addition to this, services that depended on DNS servers located in that data center were also affected.

Google Apps and Gmail trouble

Google has had numerous difficulties with its Gmail and Apps services this year, which set both the media and the blogosphere abuzz with speculation about their reliability. Just as with Amazon’s problems (see below) these issues have sparked additional debate around the current viability of so-called cloud services (and SaaS).

Amazon S3 outages

AWS (Amazon Web Services) has become somewhat of a poster boy for cloud computing, so every time S3 (or EC2) has a problem, “The Cloud” is called into question. Another reason these problems got a lot of attention is of course also that a lot of services use Amazon S3, so just like when a hosting company or data center has an outage, a lot of sites are affected. Some of the outages were quite lengthy. For example, S3 had an outage that lasted eight hours in July.

Political DDoS attack on Georgia

The growing tension between Russia and Georgia over Georgia’s membership in NATO spilled over online when the websites of several official Georgian websites, including that of the Georgian President, were subjected to a DDoS attack that made them unavailable over an entire weekend. The attackers were unknown but the motive was likely political: among the messages flooding the websites was “win+love+in+Rusia.”

SiteMeter script crashing popular blogs

In August, an update to SiteMeter’s script (websites can have it included on their pages to get visitor statistics) started crashing popular blogs like Gawker, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Valleywag and Problogger for Internet Explorer users. Presumably every single website using SiteMeter had this problem. This incident revealed how a third-party script can quite easily stop a whole site from working, which is a vulnerability that every site owner should keep in mind.

Apple’s MobileMe launch problems

When Apple was migrating .Mac accounts to the new MobileMe, things did not go as smoothly as they would have wished. Steve Jobs has later admitted (in a leaked email) that it was a mistake to launch MobileMe, the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2.0 software and App Store all on the same day, and that MobileMe should have been given more time and testing.

Cogent peering disputes with Telia AND Sprint

The ISP Cogent is a veteran of network peering disputes, and this year saw them in disputes with both Telia and Sprint. In March, a dispute with Telia was widely publicized, and October saw the start of another dispute, this time with Sprint. These peering disputes make it problematic and sometimes impossible for customers of the different networks to reach sites located on the other network. The disconnect with Sprint only lasted a few days, but the dispute with Telia lasted for two weeks.

Friendster knocked out by data center issues

Friendster was once the largest social network in the world, and while it may have lost its crown to Myspace and Facebook, it is still one of the largest in the world. In November, technical problems at the data center where Friendster hosts its servers caused the site to be unavailable for more than 23 hours in just three days, making it by far the largest incident for any social network in 2008.

Conclusion

The incidents we included in this list are just the tip of the iceberg. Every year, thousands of websites struggle with unexpected downtime, and hundreds of networks break or have other issues. And as if the “regular” problems were not enough, we have the man-made problems, like the peering disputes between Cogent, Telia and Sprint that we mentioned, or the DDoS attack on Georgian official websites.

Let us hope that 2009 will be an uneventful year in this respect. One can dream, right?

Do you feel we missed something major? Let us know in the comments!

Remember the major incidents of 2007? Go back and have a look…

The Antikythera mechanism did several things:

• It showed the position and movement of the sun, moon and planets.
• It worked as a calendar.
• It kept track of when the Olympic games and other events were being held.
• It predicted solar eclipses.

It’s the world’s oldest known complex scientific calculator, and some have even gone as far as calling it a computer.

The amazing thing here is that although the device has been dated to around 100 BC, the complexity of the clockwork-like mechanism is comparable to watches made in the 18th century. It was 1800 years before its time.

Here is a video of a working model of a reconstructed Antikythera mechanism. The demonstration is just a couple of minutes long and is well worth the watch. It’s quite amazing.

Who knows where we would have been if the knowledge of ancient Greece hadn’t been lost for so long? A prominent example is their knowledge of mathematics, which was on a level which wouldn’t be rivaled until after the Renaissance. We lost more than a thousand years of scientific development.

Just imagine if we had invented the Internet hundreds of years ago. Where would we be today?

Video found via The Guardian. Image found at gotoknow.org.

For the last five years the data recovery company Kroll Ontrack has been publishing a yearly list of strange ways people have broken their computers and/or hard drives. We here at Pingdom have gone through those press releases and handpicked the funniest and most bizarre incidents, for your reading pleasure.

On to the list!

(We’ve saved the weirdest incident for last…)

1. Aaaaalmost there! When you’ve managed to sail around the world, you don’t expect to capsize on the last day of your journey. However, this is exactly what happened, with a laptop on board that had been used to document the whole trip.
   
2. Gone fishing, part one. A lawyer on vacation brought her laptop with her when going fishing with her father, thinking she’d be able to keep up with business at the same time. This backfired when a friend of her father’s, furious that she had brought her laptop with her on board, threw it overboard. The lawyer jumped after it.
3. Safe in the oven. Thinking it was an ideal hiding place for his laptop while he was away on vacation, a man put his laptop in the kitchen oven to protect it from potential burglars. Unfortunately his wife came home before he did, and turned on the oven to do some cooking…
4. Gone fishing, part two. A fisherman brought his laptop with him on his rowing boat to play some games while waiting for the fish to bite. Then he decided to stand up, and fell overboard together with his laptop.
5. Hard drive on acid? A scientist was doing an experiment involving acid, which he (of course) managed to spill on an external hard drive. Picture the scene from Alien where the acid melts through the floor…
6. Academia greasing incident, part one. What do you do if your hard drive is squeaking? Certainly not what this British scientist did: He drilled a hole through the casing and poured oil inside. At least the squeaking stopped, but so did the hard drive.
7. Anti ant. A photographer in Thailand discovered that his external hard drive had gotten full of ants. His solution to this problem was to open the cover and spray the interior with insect repellent. He managed to kill both the ants and the hard drive in one fell swoop.
8. Don’t drop a computer from a helicopter. Really. If you bring a laptop onto a helicopter, whatever you do, hold on to it tight. Employees of a global telecom firm did not heed this advice and (accidentally) dropped a laptop from a helicopter while doing work in Monaco.
9. Want conditioner with that? If you pack your laptop together with fluids, make sure they don’t leak… On a flight from London to Warsaw a man had his shampoo leak all over the contents of his bag, including seeping into his laptop.
10. Going bananas. A man left an old banana on top of his external hard drive. As it rotted, its contents seeped into the hard drive, ruining the circuitry.
11. Academia greasing incident, part two. Apparently you really shouldn’t mix academics with technology, because here’s another greasing incident. A university professor was hearing a squeaking noise from the hard drive in his new desktop computer. His solution was to open the case and spray the inside of the drive with WD-40.
12. Heavy pottery. While rearranging her office, a woman managed to drop a five pound piece of clay pottery directly onto the hard drive area of her laptop. The hard drive contained a book she’d been working on for five years. Lesson: Don’t hold heavy stuff over your laptop, especially if you don’t have backups.
13. Hammer + laptop = bad idea. If you have a temper problem, don’t keep a hammer in the same room as your computer. Or even nearby. A frustrated writer smashed her computer with a hammer, leaving a clearly visible hammer imprint on the top cover. Gee, wonder why it broke?
14. Creepy laptop filling. An old laptop had been stored away in a warehouse for 10 years. When it was decided that the data on it should be recovered, it turned out the whole computer was stuffed full of dead and decaying cockroaches.
15. Flash drive? When a worker at a medical company had finally completed 1,200 customer billing entries after several days of work, lightning struck a transformer just outside the building, taking everything out, including the storage with all the prepared bills.
16. Steel beam on laptop = not good. During the construction of a large office building, a steel beam fell right on a laptop computer (with the building plans) and crushed it.
17. Flush away your troubles. Here’s another person with a temper problem. A man became so furious when his laptop was acting up that he threw it into the toilet and flushed repeatedly.
18. If at first you don’t succeed, back over it. A woman put her laptop on top of her car while she got in. She forgot about it and started driving, making the laptop slide off the back of the car. She then put the car in reverse and ran the computer over. People do this with sodas and coffee mugs all the time, but with computers?
19. More wheeled incidents. People obviously love running things over, computer equipment included. Examples include a laptop run over by a “people mover” at an airport, and a backpack with external hard drives that was backed over by a truck (ouch). But the winner has to be the following entry:
20. Airplane destruction. The number one spot in the in the strange laptop computer destruction contest has to go to this one. Although it’s very unclear exactly how it happened, a laptop computer apparently got run over by, of all thing, an AIRPLANE.

We hope you enjoyed this list. Truly cringeworthy examples, aren’t they?

One of the most amazing things is that in most (or all?) of the cases above, the data on the storage devices could be saved.

If you want to check out the original press releases from the company, you can find them listed here (but although we’re sure they do a great job, be prepared to filter out the usual corporate hyperbole).

What about you?

Do you have any incidents or anecdotes of your own to share? Please do so in the comments!