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23 Sep 2010 21:15

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U.S.: Why Facebook broke: A configuration error, a feedback loop

  • Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it.
  • Facebook employee Robert Johnson • Explaining why Facebook was so broken today. Simply put, there was a configuration error so huge that it caused the entire site to fall over itself. It created a feedback loop in a cluster of databases and couldn’t handle the number of requests. All engineers could do to stop it was turn off the site for two and a half hours. That’s right. The entire site. It’s not often that Facebook crashes at all, let alone in the middle of the day on a weekday. That was epic, eh? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

22 Aug 2010 22:58

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Tech: Chatroulette done with nudity, ready for Chatroulette 2.0

  • good Chatroulette is currently down, meaning that the penis army has ceased for the moment.
  • better The site will be back up tomorrow, possibly with some more polish and less penis. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

03 Apr 2010 15:34

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Tech: Dear HootSuite: Where did you jerks go? Your app is broken.

  • We’re not geniuses, but it’s unacceptable when a Twitter app that many corporations and users (including us) rely on is down for twelve hours. HootSuite appears to have been down since last night. Our question: Hacking spree? Bots? Long weekend? Fire at headquarters? We deserve an explanation, guys. source
  • Update: App’s up again, but our complaints are still valid. It’s just bad form for a Twitter client to be offline for that many hours.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

24 Mar 2010 22:37

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Tech: Wikipedia went down today, and the world somehow survived

  • And so we remember Thursday, March 25, 2010 as the day every English speaking student failed their research papers.
  • Wikipedia commenter “Jimmy” • Regarding the server meltdown that the site had earlier today. The meltdown, which knocked out the site’s European data center, caused the server not to load for many users. It was due to overheating probably caused by someone looking up this article. “This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects,” a blog post on the downtime said. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

03 Nov 2009 20:02

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Tech: T-Mobile is down nationwide, and Twitter’s pissed. Ouch.

Posted by Ernie Smith • 2 Comments • Permalink

20 Oct 2009 21:49

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Tech: FYI: Lots of people are reporting that Google’s down on Twitter.

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

25 Sep 2009 11:09

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Tech: Daily poll: Gmail and its large amounts of recent downtime

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

01 Sep 2009 20:50

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Tech: Good God, you guys freak when Gmail goes down.

Gmail downtime chart
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

06 Aug 2009 21:46

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Tech: Why was Twitter down so long due to the DDOS attack?

  • It’s unusual to see an attack on a site lasting that long. Generally there are procedures in place in case of such an attack, but unfortunately Twitter has a long history of security-related issues and this really shows that they are not very mature in this area yet.
  • Kaspersky Lab malware researcher Stefan Tanase • About the attack, which nailed a number of other big social media sites besides Twitter (Facebook, YouTube and LiveJournal) but only gave Twitter sustained fits and starts. Why did it happen in the first place? One researcher, Bill Woodcock, suggests that social networking got caught between the Russia/Georgia conflict: “One side put up propaganda, the other side figured this out and is attacking them.”  • source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 Jun 2009 20:38

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Tech: Apple is really sorry that you can’t activate your iPhone. Here’s $30.

  • Since Friday’s launch of the iPhone 3GS, the activation process has been spotty at best and completely unusable at worst. It’s not as bad as last year, when the servers completely crashed on people wanting to activate an iPhone 3G. source
  • To make up for the torrent of new iPhone activations (500,000 by one analyst’s count), Apple is making it up to users by offering a $30 iTunes Store credit to those stuck without a working phone for the weekend. Aww, how nice. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
 
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