Many sites hosted at Seattle's Fisher Plaza are offline amid widespread reports of a fire at the facility. That includes the payment portal Authorize.net, disrupting e-commerce at many web sites.
Equinix data centers in Paris and Sydney, Australia have experienced power outages this morning, according to widespread reports from affected customers.
Advertising networks and widgets are being cited as the key factors in the performance problems exerienced by major news sites during the crush of Internet traffic Thursday as news broke about the death of pop star Michael Jackson.
News sites and social media posting the earliest reports of the death of pop star Michael Jackson experienced availability problems as web users around the world sought to confirm the news
Measuring and analyzing performance data has been the primary weapon in Twitter's ongoing effort to vanquish the "Fail Whale" - the downtime mascot that appears whenever the service is unavailable, according to Twitter's John Adams.
The streaming music hub Last.fm was offline for about 5 hours Sunday after multiple chillers failed in its London data center, causing a dramatic rise in temperature inside the data center.
The Planet experienced network problems Tuesday and Wednesday that caused brief downtime for many customers, including several large web hosting providers.
Web hosting outages are proving the power of Twitter as a real-time customer communications tool, and Los Angeles hosting provider Media Temple is a prominent test case.