Running an uptime monitoring service as we do, over time it’s become obvious to us that a large portion of website problems are caused by DNS issues, and in many cases those issues were a direct result of bad DNS settings. In other words, there is a lot of downtime and other website errors that could have been avoided if the DNS servers of that website had been correctly configured from the start.

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McAfee had a nasty surprise in store for their customers a couple of weeks ago. An automatic update to its antivirus software suddenly pointed out a system-critical file in Windows XP as malicious. The result was that the file was removed, and Windows XP stopped working.

This crippled entire companies, which often have large sets of computers running XP. To make matters worse: every single computer had to be manually restored. Considering many companies had thousands of Windows XP machines, you can imagine the time it took and the outrage it caused.

Accidents such as these are uncommon, but they still happen way too often for comfort. And if you think the latest incident with McAfee was a one-off? Think again.

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The popular bookmarking service Delicious was unavailable 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.

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Twitter is an extremely popular service with millions and millions of users, and now those users can get Pingdom alerts delivered right to their Twitter accounts.

Twitter is an excellent complement to Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service, and we’re very happy to open up our service to Twitter’s huge user base. Even better, since Pingdom now has free accounts it becomes a great companion to webmasters with a Twitter account. Getting alerted of website downtime has never been easier and never cost less (i.e. nothing).

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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.

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A huge number of blogs use Feedburner to syndicate their RSS feeds. Since the service was launched in 2004, it’s pretty much become the de facto standard for this. With so many bloggers relying on Feedburner, reliability and performance is of course extremely important. RSS feeds, just like websites, need to be available all the time on the Web.

We have tested Feedburner’s RSS feed performance and uptime.

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Gmail was down for an unknown amount of time today. Judging by the talk on Twitter some people were still having issues several hours after Google said the problem had been fixed.

This article is about managing user speculation, and the real-time, online discussion that inevitably follows.

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You may remember the incident that Google had on January 31, when it during 55 minutes accidentally flagged all URL:s containing “/” as a potential malware site. This meant that every single site on the Internet was marked as harmful, including Google.com.

This is a look at some interesting side effects of that incident.

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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.

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The video-sharing site Revver has been having some major stability problems for a while now.

On November 1, Revver told TechCrunch that they were migrating to a new service provider:

Greenspan checked in and says they are in the middle of major migration from a CDN/provider to a tier 1 & top technology provider which “should make the quality of Revver videos displayed better then ever” (could take a few days).

The question is how well that migration has gone.

Our monitoring reveals that in the past month, the Revver website has been unavailable for a total of almost 24 hours. In just the last week, it has been down for more than 6 hours (including a 5-hour outage on January 17).

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