Yahoo responds to reports of site outages
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Blog: The site's downage was not actually downage, representatives say, but rather a network carrier issue that slowed it down.
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Yahoo Maps To Add Traffic Updates and Reports  Yahoo is not only becoming the goto place for multimedia search and online entertainment, it's also now offering a new service for monitoring traffic conditions online. Yahoo's offering of traffic updates lets users plan their daily travel routes around slowdowns like constructon or ...
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E-mail service of Research in Motionâs BlackBerry smartphones experienced a âcritical severity outageâ on Monday, the company told clients in an e-mail.
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Amazon.com said that its Web site experienced slowdowns for much of the day Monday but was running normally by evening.
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Research In Motion acknowledged&#160;an outage&#160;left users in the Americas without access to their BlackBerry e-mail service on Monday, but said no messages were lost during the incident.The outage started at around 3:30 p.m. Eastern time and lasted for about three hours, causing &quot;intermittent delays&quot; for data services, RIM said in an e-mail statement released hours after normal BlackBerry service had been restored.&quot;No messages were lost and message queues began to be cleared after normal service levels were restored,&quot; RIM said, adding that voice and SMS services operated normally during the outage.RIM offered an apology to users affected by the outage, but did not offer an explanation of what happened. The company only said it &quot;continues to focus on providing industry-leading reliability in its products and services.&quot;Monday&#39;s outage echoed a similar disruption that took place on April 17-18, 2007. RIM blamed the earlier service disruption on the introduction of a new software routine meant to optimize system cache memory. The problems caused by the introduction of the new routine were exacerbated by the poor performance of back-up systems, RIM said at the time.After&#160;the April 2007 outage, RIM promised that aspects of its testing, monitoring, and recovery systems would be enhanced to prevent a recurrence of the incident.&#160;
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(InfoWorld) - As Amazon.com Inc. trumpets its hosted IT infrastructure services, the Web site of its Alexa Internet division, responsible for some of the company's best known Web services for developers, has been experiencing serious availability and performance problems. Alexa's Web site has been down for over 18 hours this month, with the most serious problems experienced since Nov. 16, according to Pingdom, a Web site monitoring company based near Stockholm. For example, on Monday, the site was offline for 6 hours and 42 minutes, and already today (Wednesday), at press time, it had been unavailable for over 90 minutes, according to Pingdom's GIGRIB (Green is good, red is bad) service . Another monitoring company, Netcraft Ltd., also detected "significant" outages and delays at Alexa.com on Tuesday, which it detailed here . It isn't clear whether the problems are limited to Alexa's Web site or whether they have affected the online infrastructure it makes available to third-party developers. An Amazon.com spokesman couldn't immediately comment on the issue but said via e-mail he is looking into it. At least one user of an Alexa Web service hasn't been seriously affected by the downtime: Alexaholic.com , which lets its visitors, like webmasters, search engine marketers and publishers, contrast Web site traffic statistics on up to five domains at once. "We just wrap the Alexa graphs in a fast, Ajax interface, so we haven't been affected as much by Alexa's downtime. Occasionally I see a graph load a bit slowly, but overall it's not too bad," wrote Ron Hornbaker, founder of Alexaholic.com, in an e-mail interview. Hornbaker, in Kansas City, Missouri, speculates that the code that generates the Alexa graphs his Web site displays may run on different servers from the Alexa Web site. "Their graph servers are really outstanding, and it's a fantastic free service," he wrote. Still, the intensity and length of the performance problems affecting Alexa's Web site, as documented by Pingdom, are jarring at a time when Amazon.com's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jeff Bezos has heavily promoted the company's hosted IT infrastructure services for developers at public appearances and press interviews. BezosÂ sang the praises of Amazon servicesÂ like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco two weeks ago and at the Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in September. S3 and EC2 have become quite popular because they let developers lease storage space and computing capacity from Amazon over the Web, providing them with an option to having to buy expensive hardware, Bezos has said. This month, BusinessWeek magazine ran a story about this topic and put Bezos on the cover. The Alexa division offers four hosted services designed to let developers build Web sites and applications based on Alexa's Web index and data. "Users can access Web site traffic data, related links, contact information, as well as a powerful search engine based on the Alexa crawl, and a wide variety of other functionality and data," according to a page on Amazon.com's Web site. With the improvements in storage and bandwidth, many are saying that the much-anticipated era of network computing is finally here, and that it is now finally feasible to provide, over the Internet, hosted storage, computing and application services. At the Web 2.0 Summit,Â Google CEO Eric Schmidt also championed the hosted, software-as-service model, calling it superior to the packaged software model upon which Microsoft Corp. built its empire. "Finally now the architecture works," he said. Google plays in the software-as-service software market with its word processing, calendaring, Web mail, wiki and spreadsheet hosted applications. Yet, Google has also at times disappointed users of its hosted applications. Users of Google's Blogger have recently complained about performance problems that have hobbled that popular blog hosting and authoring service. Likewise, Google Analytics suffered crippling performance problems when demand for it surged after Google made it a free service in November.
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Amazon's virtual storage service, S3, suffered a 2.5-hour service failure Friday morning, causing outages and other problems at a wide range of web businesses. Most customers remained unconcerned, however.
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The second lengthy&#160;BlackBerry outage&#160;in less than a year has one consulting company advising clients not to rely solely on the popular smart phones for critical e-mail messages.Enterprises that really need e-mail responses in less than eight hours to run their businesses should have a backup for the BlackBerry, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said Tuesday, in the wake of a crash that lasted about three hours on Monday. They should also set up an independent system to notify them whether an important contact has received or replied to an e-mail message, Dulaney said.Late Tuesday, RIM said the outage was caused by a problem with an internal data routing system in the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had recently been upgraded. That upgrade was part of an ongoing expansion of the network, and this type of change had been done previously with no problems, it said.Monday&#39;s failure followed&#160;a longer outage in April 2007&#160;that RIM attributed to a problem with a minor software upgrade and a subsequent glitch in a failover process.There are about 12 million BlackBerry users worldwide, on a variety of mobile carriers. The crash Monday affected users throughout the U.S. and Canada, preventing them from sending or receiving e-mail or carrying out some other functions, though&#160;no messages were permanently lost, according to RIM.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney had harsh words for RIM, saying he had given the company a break after last year&#39;s failure.&quot;This does not appear to be a mission-critical system with the highest service-level agreements, and therefore, to entrust ... that a message will get to the end point is being a bit foolhardy,&quot; Dulaney said. He advises enterprises that are worried about dependability to ask RIM for details of its backup system and make their own decisions.After last year&#39;s outage, RIM said it would enhance aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes.&quot;RIM has made significant investments to improve its system recovery infrastructure and processes over the last year, which enabled service levels to return to normal quickly,&quot; the company said Tuesday.&quot;They obviously didn&#39;t do as deep a dive as they needed to on disaster recovery issues,&quot; Dulaney said. But he acknowledged the failure could have been caused by something completely unexpected.The BlackBerry, which RIM introduced in 1999, quickly became the most popular tool for mobile &quot;push&quot; e-mail that automatically comes to a portable device with a wireless network connection. All current BlackBerry models are also phones, and the company now offers a wide variety of handsets with consumer-oriented features such as cameras, Web browsers and social-networking capabilities. But to get to and from the handhelds, e-mail messages traverse a complex system involving mobile operator networks, RIM&#39;s network operation centers and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers within companies.Adding consumer features and keeping up with rapid customer growth, such as adding 1.65 million users in the quarter ended last Dec. 1, have probably made it harder for RIM to keep its network running smoothly, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. But users accept some level of risk if they want such complex services at reasonable prices, he said. The only truly reliable system is the public switched telephone network, and it has limited functionality, Lin said.&quot;When it comes to reliable push e-mail ... it&#39;s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry,&quot; Lin said.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney acknowledged that competitors, such as Visto and Good Technology (now owned by Motorola), are probably not significantly more dependable.It wouldn&#39;t be impossible to make the RIM network more reliable, the analysts said.&quot;They have the technical capability to spend more and make it more reliable, but is that what their owners and shareholders really want?&quot; Lin said.Google, for example, has a more highly distributed network, but that would take money and time, and many customers wouldn&#39;t want to pay for it, Dulaney said. In the future, RIM may choose to create a higher-end service with greater service assurances and a higher price, he said.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo suffered availability problems on Friday that affected its home page as well as some of its other Web sites and services for a sustained period of time. Yahoo, which has some of the most popular sites and online services worldwide, first experienced problems on its home page at around 5:50 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time, said Dan Berkowitz, senior communications director at Keynote Systems, a global provider of mobile and Internet test and measurement services. Yahoo.com's operations began getting back to normal at around 7:15 a.m., said Berkowitz. At its worst point, Yahoo.com's availability dropped to around 60 percent, meaning that 4 out of 10 visitors couldn't access the page, he said, citing data collected from Keynote's global network of monitoring computers, which check the availability of the world's most popular sites. Yahoo didn't reply to requests for comments about the problems. NetCraft also detected the problems, saying in a short note that the intensity of the performance issues varied among geographical areas and also among Yahoo services. "The Yahoo.com home page was inaccessible for several hours from our London monitoring station and responded more slowly than usual from several locations in the U.S. Yahoo Search appears to have experienced lengthier availability problems than the home page and other Yahoo services," NetCraft reported. A variety of bloggers also reported trouble Friday morning accessing other Yahoo services like Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail as well as other Yahoo sites like the Flickr photo sharing site and the news aggregation site Yahoo News. Ideally, Yahoo and other major Internet players would never face Web site outages, but they all do, said industry analyst Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence. The key is to make sure that significant availability problems happen infrequently. Otherwise, users and advertisers get worried and upset, he said. Yahoo's problems on Friday probably affected fewer users than usual because many people are taking time off in the U.S. and are away from their computers due to the July 4th Independence Day holiday, Berkowitz said.
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Over the last 24 hours Twitter has been down as much as it's been up. As always this gives us a reason to think about what the world would be like without Twitter and then those of us who are engineers or would-be engineers, start thinking about ways to fix the problem, whatever it is. The Twitter folk say that the recent problems are related to an infrastructure overhaul. Of course I believe them, I take it at face-value. I think the MacWorld Expo outage was about traffic, I don't think last night's Republican debate took Twitter down. Anyway, I'd like to really understand what's going on behind the scenes at Twitter, Inc. They say they're confident the new infrastructure will hold up better, I'd like to understand why. Can we have a meeting, with a few people from the tech community who actively use Twitter and a few people from the company, to be briefed on what's going on. The same way the President briefs Congress when there's some kind of international crisis.  Twitter wouldn't exist without its users. Everyone wants to know what's going on. Let's have some real honest direct communication?
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Company provides few details on outage, which came two days after online retail giant Amazon.com Inc.'s Web site faced significant performance problems.
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The currency trading platform of news and information provider Reuters Group  suffered an outage on Monday, prompting some dealers to switch to alternative venues or trade over the phone.
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Falls off the internet the best place to go for something awful - is recovering from Domain Name Server problems yesterday that left the site unaccessible for many users.â¦
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Looks like Yahoo Search has an interesting loophole or lack of communication between the quality control at the Search division and the Search Submit sales department at Yahoo Search Marketing. According to a discussion in Search Engine Watch Forums, a member had his site banned by Yahoo Search and was denied reinclusion into their search index. [...]
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By Dwight Silverman, Houston Chronicle  Feb. 27--Sick puppy that I am, I love a good computer problem. When issues arise, it's an opportunity to learn something new.   However, I'm not so warped that I don't want to find a solution eventually.
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Many travelers by now are accustomed to getting maps and driving directions on the Internet. A new offering from Yahoo Inc. will now provide real-time traffic conditions as well.
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SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Battered by slow revenue growth and the popularity of social networking Web sites, Yahoo Inc. is poised to lay off hundreds of workers, according to published reports.