2007 Had Its Share Of Internet Woes
Michael Arrington
26 comments »
2007 definitely felt like it had its share of Internet woes.
There was the mundane, such as Twitter’s frustrating downtime. And there were more dramatic moments, like when a truck slammed into a power transformer and brought down a significant part of the Internet. Through it all, Pingdom was there to quietly monitor when sites were live or not.
Today they summarized the major incidents on the Internet in 2007. In addition to the Twitter and Rackspace outages above, the report also mentions the multi-day Skype outage in August (it was Microsoft’s fault), the 365 Main outage in San Francisco, and other major Internet problems.
By the way, if you don’t recognize the image, it’s because you were never a Bloglines user. That guy, the Plumber, popped up whenever Bloglines was down, which was quite often back in 2005/2006. They may still have a lot of downtime, but we, along with a lot of other users, moved on to Google Reader last year.
Reminds me of Mario from Super Mario Bros.
I thought nobody would ever take the Twitter outages seriously…
Good that it’s not true.
And ironically, their intended, or unintended downtime created press articles for free advertising.. just like the facebook beacon..
I only remember this
http://flickr.com/photos/superfrunny/430363168/
Nobody ever said Internet was fail-proof - only Titan was unsinkable!
I’m pretty sure the Skype outage was Skype’s fault, not Microsoft. Microsoft Auto Update triggered a flaw on Skype’s network.
Well, what about the zoooooomr upgrade debacle?
You remember, when we upgraded to Mark III of the photo community sharing site Zooomr that is almost certainly the bestest photo sharing community site in existence and instead of upgrading the site went down for a week and we broadcast the failure LIVE all week and we had to beg for hardware on Scoble’s blog and right here on Techcrunch and if Zoho hadn’t stepped in the site would probably STILL be down?
What about that episode?
That should win fail of the year!
the post needs more links
Should have gotten a maytag
I guess Bloglines fears the plumber parody.
The last outage they dropped the plumber and went with some spacey looking colored ball wallpaper. And as they kept missing the restore time, they kept bumping the come back time forward on an hourly basis
The problems with any downtime is that we more and more are dependent on the web for business and the internet for the business platform. It is not so much how companies are affected - this is not to suggest that it is not important to companies and how revenue is affected - but how, we as consumers, can not do some of our most mundane activities without operational access to the web and internet.
Fabian is right on:
There may come a time when a major regional outage (not a service outage, but could be), takes down access to thousands of web based business apps.
When that happens, some will rethink their dependence on a 100% web based application toolset.
I have had outages with basecamp, and other applications, and I realized that gmail going down was a big problem when I relied on jsut the web interface, so I got pop running.
Matter of time.
interesting…. have a great holiday
Bloglines is one of those things that just can’t have downtimes because people become so dependent on using it (still better than Google reader imo). They changed their downtime image to some ultra colorful one that looks too elementary: http://idealmindsonline.com/im.....epage.html
Bloglines is still the best web rss reader out there, specially if you are subscribed to hundreds of feeds, their simple folders interface without ajaxy-bloated-fancy simply doesn’t get in your way from what matters (the posts) and the “keep” button is the best.
It is true that with bloglines beta they tried to copy the crappy google reader interface and annoying features like “read as you scroll” and it was a disaster, luckily, the bloglines classic is still the default interface and continues to kick ass.
Plus, they are crystal clear about what you are marking as public vs private, and don’t change privacy expectations in the middle of the game
Twitter’s outage was a big issue? Come on… there must have been some more important sites/services that had outages and actually cost someone some dollars.
2008 may go down as the first time we have a fossil fuel related outage.
Interesting stuff…. that bloglines plumber is a PITA, but I just can’t wrest myself away from their cool blue familiarity.
Of note: even in the last 38 days (which is as far back as the TW index goes), posts about “downtime” are predominantly Twitter related:
http://techwatching.com/index......mp;range=0
Say what you will about the utility of the twitter service, the outcry that arises when its unavailable speaks to the impact its had on people’s lives.
@Fabricio Zuardi, @rod I totally agree. bloglines interface is far superior to google reader. Give me simple, intuitive, and fast.
Yeah, but thru it all…
The Beat Goes On ………. Everybody Sing now!
Microsoft did not have anything to do with the skype thing!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Michael,
I have had that image on my computer from back in 2001 or 2002. It first appeared on Yahoo! Groups’ site when they were down for maintenance. Bloglines must’ve gotten it from Yahoo! or perhaps it’s from some stock photography site. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to point out Yahoo! was first to use it.
Best wishes for the New Year!
-Doug
What about the huge 12-hour BlackBerry outage in April? If Skype is on the list, it seems to me that this one should be as well.
@Doug Mehus: The plumbers connection to both Yahoo Groups, and Bloglines, is that they were both founded by Mark Fletcher. (ONEList -> eGroups -> Yahoo Groups).
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two of our writers were citing a previous TC blog on twitter downtime, michael… hence, we shall have an episode wittering twitter and a fun vid episode inside data centers when we launch.
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happy holidays, lovelies. i have enough choco from christmas now to open a swish choco emporium…