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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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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We all know which sites are popular today, but at one point they were new up-and-comers with an uncertain future. What was the buzz around these websites when they were just getting started? What was being said? We’ve done the digging so you can do the reading.

We looked for early mentions of YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Google in the press and blogosphere.

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Wikipedia, the über-popular online encyclopedia, went down briefly today. It was unavailable for about 15 minutes, starting at 11:17 CET according to our Pingdom monitoring.

The service was responding with HTTP error 503 (service unavailable) and displayed an error page stating that the Wikimedia servers were experiencing a technical problem (screenshot below).

Wikimedia.org was also down, indicating that Wikimedia had some form of general problem that likely affected all its websites, not just Wikipedia.

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Wikipedia was down twice yesterday (September 30).

The first and longest outage lasted half an hour and started just after 4 p.m. CET (10 a.m. EST), and the second one was a short ten-minute outage a couple of hours later. In total, the website was unavailable for approximately 40 minutes.

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Not long ago we all used an ordinary encyclopedia when we needed to find information about something. Today the Internet can give us the answer to (almost) anything. When it comes to getting the facts on basically anything between heaven and earth, one particular site really stands out. Yes, Wikipedia, we are talking about you. [...]

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Have you ever wondered what technology some of the really big websites use? The likes of Digg, YouTube, Myspace and so on? There is a very interesting website called High Scalability that is dedicated to, as they put it themselves, “building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.” They collect information about the architecture of high-traffic websites [...]

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(This is an update with new data. The previous survey was done on April 2.) These are the 20 most popular websites in the United States, according to Alexa. In other words, they have tons of visitor traffic. How are they holding up under that pressure? Here you can see the downtime so far in [...]

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Wikipedia is on a roll. After a sometimes rocky uptime record in 2006, the online encyclopedia has only collected a total of 2 hours and 33 minutes of downtime so far in 2007. Wikipedia is the 8th most popular website on the internet according to Alexa. Judging by its immense growth in traffic it looks [...]

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These are the 20 most popular websites in the United States, according to Alexa. In other words, they have tons of visitor traffic. How are they holding up under that pressure? Here you can see the downtime so far in 2007 for each of these 20 websites, as measured by GIGRIB. Downtime in 2007 for [...]

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