Posted in
Main on June 8th, 2011 by Pingdom
Microsoft is one of the largest and most profitable tech companies in the world, but sometimes we can’t help but feel a bit sorry for them.
Why? Because the online community won’t cut them any slack whatsoever. There is so little love shown that it’s scary. If there’s even the slightest chance that something can be blamed on Microsoft, it will.
Whatever the exact opposite of goodwill is, Microsoft has plenty of it.
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Posted in
Main on April 27th, 2011 by Pingdom
It has probably escaped no one that Amazon had several days of serious issues with its cloud hosting service last week, which took a large number of sites either fully or partly offline, including sites like Reddit, Foursquare and Quora.
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Posted in
Main on December 21st, 2010 by Pingdom
In what has become something of a yearly tradition, it’s now time for us to present 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet from this past year. As you’ll see, 2010 has been very interesting.
Just like previous years, we have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. If you’re an avid Web user, you are bound to recognize several of them.
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Posted in
Main on December 18th, 2009 by Pingdom
Now that this decade is coming to an end, we thought it would be a good time to list the very worst Internet disasters that happened between 2000 and 2009. And believe us, there have been some really big ones. Some you may remember, and some may be new to you, but they all affected a huge amount of Internet users.
We focused on Internet service disruptions that lasted a significant amount of time and affected many people. Other criteria were that the incident shouldn’t be about any one single service or website and that it should be technical in nature (i.e. the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000 doesn’t count).
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Posted in
Main on September 30th, 2009 by Guy Rosen
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.)
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Posted in
Main on September 8th, 2009 by Pingdom
If you suddenly find yourself without an Internet connection, there’s a good chance that somewhere a team of construction workers just uttered a collective “uh-oh” because their backhoe dug up a telecom cable. Oops.
It turns out that this problem is so common that it is costing millions upon millions of dollars in repairs every year. Backhoes, drilling and digging are serious cable killers.
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Posted in
Main on August 4th, 2009 by Pingdom
As you may know, PayPal suffered from downtime yesterday. Overall, the problems lasted approximately 4.5 hours before being fully resolved. Since a significant number of e-commerce sites and online services handle some or all of their transactions through PayPal, how much money did the PayPal outage end up costing its users?
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Posted in
Main on July 28th, 2009 by Pingdom
Pingdom was made to directly alert our users of any downtime that might occur on servers and websites. But in many cases it’s a good idea to configure your Pingdom checks to first wait for a while and only alert you if the downtime continues.
In this post we give some recommendations on how to configure your Pingdom alerts to avoid getting alerts for temporary issues that might go away automatically before you even have time to get to a computer.
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Posted in
Main on July 10th, 2009 by Pingdom
Data Center Knowledge has posted an interesting article about customer poaching in the web hosting industry, especially in combination with downtime incidents, sometimes referred to as “rescue marketing”.
What happens is that when a hosting provider suffers from downtime (which will understandably result in lots of frustrated customers), competing companies will swoop in and try to take advantage of this. In the past this was often accomplished with text ads in search engines, but these days Twitter is becoming an increasingly common way to target customers.
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Posted in
Main on May 8th, 2009 by Pingdom
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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