SiteMeter Crashing Popular Blogs

A number of large blogs are reporting that their sites are crashing when viewed in Internet Explorer, and are attributing the problem to code from the web metrics service SiteMeter. The issue, which was first noticed by Duncan Riley, has affected many site including the Gawker Media network including Gawker, Valleywag, Gizmodo and Lifehacker, as well as ProBlogger. SiteMeter provides third-party tracking of web site traffic through a snippet of code placed on each page of the web site or blog. Read more at Wired

UPDATE: SiteMeter has fixed the problem and written a blog post explaining what happened. The SANS Internet Storm Center also has a post about the issue. “Just as with advertisement providers and the republishing of RSS feeds, it’s an interesting example of how dependent our sites have become on third party code and the potential impact,” writes ISC”s Maarten Van Horenbeeck.