Fasthosts 'electrical issue' halts service for four hours
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Where's the fire? Fasthosts, the UK's largest web hosting company, suffered a four hour outage to its service yesterday evening.â¦
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Your work computer just suffered a major meltdown. Maybe the operating system failed, or a virus crashed the hard drive.
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The backup generator for this data center kicks in about 12 seconds after the power goes out, says an IT pilot fish who works there. At least, that's how it's supposed to work.
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BlackBerry mobile data services were disrupted Monday afternoon due to a problem with Research In Motion&#39;s infrastructure, apparently affecting customers of all major North American mobile operators, an AT&amp;T Wireless spokesman said.RIM told AT&amp;T the problem began at about 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time and that the Waterloo, Ontario, company was working to identify and solve the problem, said AT&amp;T spokesman Mark Siegel. RIM officials were not immediately available for comment.After 6 p.m. Eastern, users on a BlackBerry Internet message board began reporting that service had returned to normal.The popular smart phones rely on both a cellular network for transport and RIM&#39;s own network for pushing e-mail to end-users. Last month, problems with AT&amp;T&#39;s network disrupted service to some of its subscribers with BlackBerrys, as well as iPhone users.Several users on various mobile networks reported connection problems on Monday afternoon on the message board.BlackBerry users may not be able to send or receive messages, browse the Internet, or use the BlackBerry Internet Service Web site, according to a message from RIM that some users on the board posted. In addition, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers may not be able to connect to RIM&#39;s infrastructure, and carriers and resellers may not be able to create accounts or provision services, the notice said. The outage happened because &quot;a component of the network infrastructure is experiencing a service interruption.&quot;Zenprise, a maker of service management software that monitors BlackBerry service and notifies administrators of problems, detected the outage and notified customers at 3:23 p.m. Eastern, according to Ahmed Datoo, Zenprise&#39;s vice president of marketing. After running a series of tests, Zenprise determined that the root of the problem was in RIM&#39;s infrastructure. The Fremont, California, company, which counts about 100 enterprises and SMBs among its customers, has not determined the total scope of the outage. BlackBerry service for Zenprise&#39;s own customers has been going up and down during the outage, Datoo said.
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Web sites for President Bush's campaign and the Republican National Committee suffered outages for several hours on Wednesday.
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By Nick Perry, Seattle Times  Feb. 16--Four days unplugged? LOL ... RU crazy?   It's tough tuning out in today's world.
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Weather-related outages left more than 5,000 Rocky Mountain Power customers in Salt Lake and Tooele counties without electricity for at least part of the day Sunday.  Some of those customers were expected to be without power until early today, company spokesman Jeff Hymas said.
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Some Rhapsody users are huffing and puffing but the service won't let them in. Second outage since March blocks an unknown number of customers and some are frustrated that the company doesn't know when it will be fixed.
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Q falls out with A Google has decided to close its answers service after four years in operation.â¦
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So much for redundant power supplies Some of the net's biggest websites went dark following power interruptions in San Francisco that are disrupted operations at co-location facility 365 Main.â¦
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DESPITE furious repair efforts, intermittent service outages at the online payment service PayPal continued Tuesday for the fifth consecutive day, affecting payments, log-ins and account creations.
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Repairs were underway Monday at PayPal as the widely used online payment service struggled to get customers back on track after several days of "intermittent" outages.
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HALIFAX (CP) - The lights and heat came back on for ten of thousands of Nova Scotians early Tuesday, but the province's electric utility said it will be the end of the week before service is restored to all customers.
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By Nisrin Othman; Kalbana Perimbanayagam  JAMIE, of Kepong, is disappointed with the frequent interruption of her Streamyx service at her office since Jan 22.
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Some customers are concerned that domain registrar and hosting firm can't handle early move to Daylight Saving Time.
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There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble. What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time? What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps on tickin.  Same with email. If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.  Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step. Assuming these long outages are really necessary, explain to us what they're for. I can take a guess -- something about their database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.  Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally.  It's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet. I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space as competition to Twitter.  Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.
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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.