Today we are starting a new, weekly recurring post that we hope you will find useful. The purpose of this weekly post is, as the title implies, to sum up some of the more noteworthy problems that have occurred on the Internet during the past week. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.
We are not going to be able to cover everything that happens out there, so if we omit anything that you feel is important, please feel free to add this information in the comments, preferably with a link to a source (such as a news article or service status page with relevant information).
Incidents between October 27 – November 2:
- WordPress.com: The WordPress.com blog platform (hosting more than 4.5 million blogs and not to be confused with the WordPress blog software) was subjected to a DDoS attack on October 27 that caused some of its blogs to become unavailable for a period of time. WordPress.com has three data centers and was able to reroute the relevant traffic to unaffected servers once the DDoS attack had been identified and isolated.
- Match.com: The dating website Match.com experienced technical difficulties and was unavailable for more than an hour and a half on October 29.
- Cogent vs. Sprint: October 30 saw the start of another peering dispute involving Cogent, this time with Sprint. The Renesys blog has a detailed account of the effects of the disconnect, which affected for example Expedia and Pfizer. As of November 2, Cogent and Sprint have resumed the peering connection, at least for now. You may recall that Cogent has been involved in several peering disputes in the past, for example with Telia.
- Baidu: Baidu, China’s own Google, was unreachable from North America and Europe (and probably the rest of the world as well) for more than eight hours on October 30, possibly because of the Great Firewall of China.
That’s it for this time! As already mentioned, we will keep doing this once a week, so if you see anything you would like us to include, please send us a tip.
