Announcing SolarWinds Observability

The website of the digital content delivery (file sharing) service Yousendit was unavailable for 5 hours and 15 minutes yesterday (November 17).

The downtime was divided into four outages happening over a six-hour period that started soon after 7 p.m. CET (1 p.m. US EST). The shortest outage lasted 30 minutes and the longest lasted 2 hours and 25 minutes.

This is a weekly recurring post about noteworthy incidents on the Internet. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.

We are not going to be able to cover everything that happens out there, so if we omit anything that you feel is important, please feel free to add this information in the comments, preferably with a link to a source (such as a news article or service status page with relevant information).

This week it’s all about social networks: Trouble at Friendster, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The social network site LinkedIn had two hour-long outages last week, one on Thursday and one on Sunday.

The first outage, on November 13 at 10:06 p.m. EST, lasted one hour and five minutes. According to a message displayed on the website the downtime was due to planned maintenance.

Our website had a bit over one hour of downtime this Friday evening, Swedish time. It was caused by a combination of a human error and bad luck, and we apologize for the inconvenience this might have caused our visitors and users.

The important thing to note here is that we got an alert about this problem the same minute it happened so we could immediately start working on the problem and solve it as soon as possible. We always emphasize how important it is to monitor your website, and we live according to this motto ourselves. Everyone will have downtime (even an uptime monitoring company), it is just a matter of minimizing it.

The social network Friendster is having a bad couple of days. According to our monitoring, the Friendster website has been unavailable for a total of more than 18 hours since yesterday. As of this writing, the website is completely unreachable and has been so for more than six hours straight.

This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. It looks like the secret HQ of a James Bond villain.

And it is real. It is a newly opened high-security data center run by one of Sweden’s largest ISPs, located in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city, sealed off from the world by entrance doors 40 cm thick (almost 16 inches).

Read the full post for plenty of more pictures and cool information.

Following an investigation by Brian Kreb at Washington Post that exposed the web hosting firm McColo as one of the main originator of spam on the Internet, the ISPs providing Internet access to the firm pulled the plug on them (effectively shutting them down).

The effect this had on the world’s spam levels was amazing. The amount of spam immediately dropped by between 66-75%, depending if you look at numbers from spam trackers IronPort (66%) or Spamcop (75%). A pretty amazing number no matter which one you pick.

Sometimes disagreements and conflicts spill over from real life to online, and sometimes people go completely overboard and launch cyber attacks on services or websites they dislike, doing their best to sabotage them and often causing some serious downtime.

This sabotage is often done using distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks) which send such extreme amounts of traffic to a website that it is effectively disabled.

This article takes a look at some high-profile examples of cyber attacks, how the attacked website was affected and why it was attacked (where this information is available). We also take a quick look at how these attacks are usually launched, what the long arm of the law is doing about it and how bad the punishment can actually get.

This is the second week of our new, weekly recurring post about noteworthy incidents on the Internet. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.

We are not going to be able to cover everything that happens out there, so if we omit anything that you feel is important, please feel free to add this information in the comments, preferably with a link to a source (such as a news article or service status page with relevant information).

The BBC website was subjected to a DDoS attack on Thursday evening (November 6) that crippled the website’s performance significantly.

During the attack, the BBC website responded very slowly, and our monitoring shows that for a total of 1 hour and 15 minutes it did not respond at all. The downtime was spread over multiple short intervals, lasting just a few minutes each time.

The attack lasted the entire evening. It started to have an effect after 5 p.m. CET and the performance was not back to normal until after 10 p.m. CET.

Many of today’s largest tech companies, such as Sony, Nokia, Samsung and IBM, have been around for a very long time (some since the 1800s). Their beginnings were often very humble, and it is fascinating to look back and see how they actually got started.

We selected nine of the world’s oldest and largest tech companies to see how and when they got started. As you will notice, many were initially doing completely different things from what they are doing today and have been active in a lot of different business areas.

The Pingdom website has been included as one of the examples in The Web Designer’s Idea Book. It is, as the name implies, a guide to themes, trends and styles in website design and was written by Patrick McNeil who also runs the very popular Design Meltdown web design portal. We have a copy of the book and can definitely say that it’s a really cool book, shock full with website inspiration.

This US election, the Web was more important than ever, and this includes the presidential candidates’ websites. So how did these websites perform in the ever-important months leading up to the election? Our Pingdom monitoring results are in…

This report presents an analysis of 100 top blogs, picked from the Technorati top 100 list. For each of these blogs, the front page (homepage) has been analyzed to see how large its download size is and what contributes the most to this size.

We have chosen to not present the blogs individually in this report, but have instead focused on them as a group to get more general data.

Bumper stickers give people a chance to express their personality. So, what happens when the car owner is a dedicated computer geek (like us Pingdom-ites)?

This is what happens. 🙂

Go on for 15 photos that will put a smile on your face.

People trying to access Apple’s Mobile Me by going directly to the me.com domain yesterday were met by a 404 HTTP error response and a white screen with a single text message on it: “Not Found: Resource does not exist.”

Accessing me.com/mail worked, but anyone typing in www.me.com or me.com got the error page mentioned above and was not redirected to the login page (which is what is supposed to happen).

Today we are starting a new, weekly recurring post that we hope you will find useful. The purpose of this weekly post is, as the title implies, to sum up some of the more noteworthy problems that have occurred on the Internet during the past week. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.

We are not going to be able to cover everything that happens out there, so if we omit anything that you feel is important, please feel free to add this information in the comments, preferably with a link to a source (such as a news article or service status page with relevant information).

There is a lot of money being made in Open Source, although the profitable companies are not always the ones you would expect.

While many companies don’t disclose detailed financial information we have dug around to find numbers for some well-known open source companies and projects to see how they are doing financially.

We start with perhaps the most famous of them all…

The recent world-wide financial chaos has reminded us how sensitive the stock market is, with sharp up- and downturns. Now imagine the reaction of the stock traders if they couldn’t trade at all. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.

Stock exchanges usually have strict SLAs and high demands on availability, but they can’t completely avoid downtime. We have gathered up some of the major stock exchange outages that have occurred so far this decade (i.e. since 2000 and onward) and listed when and why they happened.

Baidu, which is China’s equivalent to Google, has been unavailable since 09:50 this morning, Central European Time. That is more than five hours and counting as of this writing.

The problem might be related to the so-called Great Firewall of China, since it seems like the website is accessible from within China (we performed a test with a proxy server located within China). However, none of the Pingdom test servers in Europe or North America are able to access the site.