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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.
A DDoS attack on the DNS servers of the domain registrar Network Solutions slowed down access to hundreds of thousands of websites during several hours last Friday (January 23).
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).
The blogging service Blog.com was unavailable almost 8 hours straight last Friday (January 16).
The outage started at 5:05 a.m. CET and didn’t end until 12:50 p.m. CET (a total of 7 hours and 45 minutes). The site was completely unreachable during that time, indicating either a server or network failure.
Netvibes-competitor Pageflakes was unavailable for close to 7 hours last Friday (January 9).
The longest outage started at 1:49 p.m. EST, when the site went down for 6 hours and 38 minutes. It was completely inaccessible during this time.
It’s a common scenario: A new website launches after having built up a lot of hype around its service or product, only to almost immediately crash due to overwhelming traffic. These launch troubles are almost always scalability-related.
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, and advice on how to avoid these kinds of problems.
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.
The blog search engine Technorati suffered from both downtime and slowdown during large periods of December 12 and 13. In those two days, the Technorati website was completely unavailable for a total of more than 9 hours.
There are indications that the problems may have been caused by database issues at Technorati.
The website of the UK bookstore Blackwell was unavailable for more than 7 hours this Wednesday, December 10. Blackwell is the largest academic bookseller in the UK, and one of the first to start selling books online.
Gmail could be unavailable for more than 21 hours in a day, and Google could still tell you that according to their SLA, the service has had 100% uptime.
It sounds impossible, but it’s a direct consequence of how Google has written its SLA for Google Apps (which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and more). We will explain this in detail further down, but let’s first look at what the SLA actually says.
