Bush and GOP Web Sites Suffer Outages
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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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A controversy which has flared over two bloggers working for the campaign of US presidential hopeful John Edwards has highlighted the pitfalls facing candidates as they embrace the Web to reach voters.
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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&#39;s data storage service was down for several hours on Friday morning, leaving businesses that rely on the service offline.As of around 9 a.m. on the West Coast of the U.S., the issue had been resolved, according to an Amazon employee posting on a user group forum. &quot;This morning&#39;s issue has been resolved, and the system is continuing to recover,&quot; wrote Kathrin, the Amazon employee, on the forum.She said that the company plans to post technical information about what exactly happened, but that the priority is to make sure the system is stable.Companies use Amazon&#39;s Simple Storage Service, known as S3, to store and quickly retrieve large amounts of data, often to run Web sites and services.A press spokesman said that one of three geographic locations for the service was unreachable for about two hours, but that it was operating at 99 percent of normal performance before 7 a.m. on the West Coast. &quot;We&#39;ve been communicating with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing additional information as soon as we have it,&quot; said Drew Herdener in a statement.Many customers appeared not to have gotten that communication. They complained on the forum about a lack of information from Amazon about the outage and when it would be fixed. One suggested that Amazon could have at least posted a message on the front page of the Web services site so that customers would be aware that the problem wasn&#39;t on their end.Others wrote about the problems that the outage was causing their businesses. &quot;It&#39;s becoming very embarrassing for us here,&quot; one wrote. &quot;We desperately need an update ... it&#39;s a huge hit on our reputation.&quot;Many of the users said that the service was down for around three hours.Gustavo, a user in Brazil, said that his company hosts more than 30,000 images from a large television station in Brazil. &quot;Now we are having several problems because of this S3 issue,&quot; he wrote. &quot;My company chose to work with Amazon because of its reliability.&quot;Late last year, Amazon introduced a new service level agreement for S3 that guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime each month. If the service slips below that level, the company promised to provide service credits to certain users.
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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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A favored online tactic to mock the president â altering the Google search engine so the words âmiserable failureâ lead to President Bushâs home page â has been neutralized.
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Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections
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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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The popular social-networking site MySpace.com suffered a pair of extended outages over the weekend because of power problems at a key data center in the Los Angeles area, the company said Monday.
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A Web site documenting the salaries of the roughly 20,000 Capitol Hill employees went live last week -- and almost as soon came crashing down.
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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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Holiday slowdowns and crashes at Kmart.com, Amazon.com and others highlight the Web's persistent growing pains.
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Surfers trying to view President Bush's official campaign website are finding it a tad difficult to get in. No explanation has been given, even though the site works just fine in the United States.
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By Bob Mims, The Salt Lake Tribune  Feb. 20--Technical woes during ArosNet's move to new offices left about  3,000 of the Internet provider's Utah customers without service over the  weekend.
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People based outside the US have been unable to visit the re-election website of President Bush.
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An ad snafu prevents a lot of you from being able to read our site today. Wired News apologizes for the screw-up.
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E-voting machine problems caused more than 4,500 votes to be lost in one North Carolina county during Tuesday's general election, and gave U.S. President George Bush more than 3,800 extra votes in Ohio, according to The Associated Press.