Downtime

Home
Downtime

New Zealand Earthquake Hobbles Telco System
February 22nd, 2011 : Rich Miller
A major earthquake near Christchurch, New Zealand has caused widespread damage and at least 65 deaths. Much of the city is without power, and telecom companies are urging residents to use SMS text messages instead of mobile phone calls to preserve limited battery capacity. Read More
Was Egypt’s ‘Kill Switch’ the Big Red Button?
February 21st, 2011 : Rich Miller
Did a common data center safety feature play a role in the Mubarak government's move to cut off Egypt's access to the Internet? Recent reports suggest that equipment at a key Internet exchange in Cairo may have been powered down by "throwing a breaker." Read More
Valentine’s Day Traffic Slams Florist Sites
February 16th, 2011 : Rich Miller
Is your data center ready to handle traffic on your busiest day? A Pingdom analysis found several prominent florists saw their web sites slammed by Valentine's Day traffic. Read More
IBM’s Watson Delivers, but His Web Site Doesn’t
February 15th, 2011 : Rich Miller
The IBM Watson supercomputer seems to be able to beat the best humans in Jeopardy. But his web site isn't faring nearly as well. The web site hosting IBM's post-match commentary blog, asmarterplanet.com, was experiencing availability problems Tuesday evening. Read More
Egyptian Networks Turn Off the Internet
January 27th, 2011 : Rich Miller
After day-long reports that Egyptian users access to social networks has been disrupted, Internet routing experts say Thursday night that the entire nation is largely cut off from the Internet. Read More
Brisbane, Queensland Flooding Impacts ISPs
January 11th, 2011 : Colleen Miller
In Australia, flash flooding in Queensland has caused the Brisbane River to overflow its banks. Australian ISPs are reporting outages and major IT firms have contributed to a flood fund. Read More
Skype: Overloaded Servers Caused Ripple Effect
December 29th, 2010 : Rich Miller
Skype says last week's massive outage was triggered when a cluster of servers became overloaded, causing congestion and capacity problems that were exacerbated by a bug in the latest version of Skype's Windows software client. Read More
Roundup: Skype’s Massive Service Outage
December 22nd, 2010 : Rich Miller
The Internet telephony service Skype is experiencing a massive outage today, leaving its users to ponder a new question: what's a mega-supernode? Here's a roundup of some of the notable analysis and commentary. Read More
2010: The Year in Downtime
December 22nd, 2010 : Rich Miller
Lightning storms, floods, car crashes and errant transfer switches were the culprits in some of this year's most significant data center outages. 2010 also saw at least four major outages for e-commerce services, and incidents that knocked government services offline for days. Read More