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What happened with the Internet in 2009?
How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way. 
Last night, a routine maintenance of Sweden’s top-level domain .se went seriously wrong, introducing an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working at this point. Swedish (.se) websites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still.
Last week, Gmail failed – for the third time in recent months. Yet again, the media and blogosphere declared the end of hosted services, software-as-a-service and cloud computing as we know it.
Here’s why I disagree:
(Read on to get cloud computing expert Guy Rosen’s take on how the latest Gmail problems relate to the viability of cloud computing in general.)
We humans are (mostly) a social breed. Ever since we have been able to connect computers together, we have enjoyed using our computers to communicate with each other. These days it’s hard to imagine a life without computer messaging such as email, IM and other applications that let us communicate cheaply and over great distances.
We decided to take a look at the history of computer messaging, the technologies and services that ultimately led us to where we are today.
It seems like every month there is some kind of news story about leaked emails. When emails never intended for the public eye are leaked, the consequences can be huge. People have lost their jobs, whole companies have been embarrassed, and in some cases the information revealed can even be dangerous.
Considering how easily emails can be leaked, it’s almost surprising we don’t hear about leaks more often. Here are a few famous examples of leaked emails and what their consequences were.
Just imagine how extremely happy we were when the following email dropped into the support inbox here at Pingdom:
Financial Times just published an article about the “secret war on web crooks.” The article contains several interesting tidbits of information about spam and the challenges of trying to prevent it.
Spam. Those pointless, highly annoying junk messages that keep showing up in your inbox. Sadly enough, it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting rid of spam anytime soon, so in the meantime, here are some interesting facts you probably didn’t know about those pesky electronic messages everyone loves to hate.
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.
President Barack Obama is said to be significantly more tech-savvy than his predecessor, so one might wonder how he felt when the White House mail server suffered a meltdown yesterday, leaving his entire press office without access to the official White House email addresses for much of the day.
