Can Microsoft's army of programmers write software for the Web? Judging by a spate of recent outages, no. Hotmail, Messenger, and other services targeted at developers and partners have broken down recently. Which is bizarre: Writing an operating system is a vastly more complex affair than coding a website. "Like war versus paintball," says Ted Dziuba, the programmer and former editor of startup-debunker blog Uncov. Therein lies Microsoft's problem. Once you've trained to fight a real war, you can forget about winning at paintball.

Senator Joe Lieberman accused his Democratic challenger Ned Lamont's supporters of a "coordinated attack" on his website during the campaign in 2006. The FBI investigated and found no evidence of foul play. The website had failed as a result of Lieberman campaign technicians' ineptitude. [NYT]

A number of servers running Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud service, which provides pay-by-the-hour computation, went offline this morning from 2 to 3:30 a.m. EC2 is one of Amazon's developer services, offering low-cost virtual servers mostly to startups. Dozens of users complained in this thread on Amazon's message board, where an Amazon staffer reported the "notworking team" — a Freudian slip for "networking"? — was on the problem. What were they complaining about? That their websites stopped losing money for 90 minutes?

The Web's most normal pool of singles, OkCupid, is so easy. I thought it a testament to their smart matching software that my ex-boy and I bumped into one another there regularly. That is, until I heard of a match made by an OkCupid bug that tried to hook up a well-behaved lady with a married guy she knows from work. Here's my bug report.

Head TechCruncher Michael Arrington says his site is slow "due to some sort of DOS [denial of service] attack." What, did Arrington give the wrong startup a bad review? [Twitter]

Digg went down this morning and, while repairs were under way, a placeholder for Digg.com redirected users to some of the staff's favorite sites. Mostly the boring usuals. Kevin Rose recommended "Purple & Brown." PaidContent and TechCrunch were on the list. But then, some guy named Micah recommended SuicideGirls, the "alternative" porn site which features girls with piercings, colored hair and tattoos. The link might upset the sensitive users who made nice guy Jay Adelson yank our Gene Simmons sex tape post from Digg. For us, SuicideGirls beats screen-cleaning puppies any day. Only thing. What will advertisers think? We heard Digg hates porn because it likes money. The screenshot of Digg's porn-loving placeholder is below.

I got the strangest feeling of deja vu this morning. When I clicked over to Digg to see if Kevin Rose had sold out yet, I was greeted by an "Out of Service" message — in the middle of the day. The site is back up, but it reminded me of a similar outage in January: Digg went offline in the middle of the day while "making some changes." During the last outage, we thought the site was unintentionally taken offline. Generally downtimes are scheduled for out of the way hours like 3 A.M. on a Sunday — not 9 A.M. in the middle of the week. After Digg came back online in January, there were significant changes made to the algorithm that decides which stories make it to the front page, angering a few of Digg's higher profile users. What's the deal this time? Our theories and a poll after the jump.

John Mayer sat there waiting — waiting — on his iTunes to load. It never did. And like the rest of us, he had to force quit. But instead of doing so and moving on, Mayer felt compelled to write a cheery missive to the folks at Apple. "Hi guys. John Mayer here. Nothing's worse than running to stale music on your iPod, am I right?" He goes on in such a manner. We know this because Mayer posted the below screenshot of his report to his blog, fully indicating his cleverness to those paying attention. At the end of his post, Mayer wonders how Apple engineers will react to his letter. Anyone care to inform us how it was greeted at One Infinite Loop?

Coincidentally, the Valleywag crew was chatting in Campfire about how much we loved a new site we'd discovered, Downforeveryoneorjustme.com, right before we had to use it on our own site. Some theories we came up with: Nick Denton, Gawker Media's owner and publisher of Valleywag, likes to bring down his sites occasionally just to watch how his editors deal with the unbearable pressure of not being able to write. As part of Jason Calacanis's new Valleywag charm campaign, Mahalo guides posted so many links to us that it brought the site down. Or, most plausibly, outraged Arthur C. Clarke fans launched a denial-of-service campaign against the unremarkable observation that the deceased sci-fi writer was an admitted pedophile.

The video Joe Francis has promised would be on the Girls Gone Wild homepage yesterday evening was finally posted this afternoon, but reveals nothing beyond what's in the stills. The Associated Press has more footage than Francis's customers, who can claim deceptive advertising if their Dupré-motivated signups don't deliver on the naughty bits. There's nothing in the members' area, the site is slow to respond, and support emails remain unanswered. Francis could be playing the tease and building anticipation. Or perhaps he's worried that after an explosive burst of traffic, the site would go down. Which is surprising, because commenter Dweezil tells us Francis's backend is fully scalable.

TheProgramme.tv posts a screenshot of a Google News homepage that features one and only one story — an editorial from Pakistan's The Nation reposted to Worldmeet.us titled U.S. Disrespect for Pakistan Sovereignty Must End .... This smells like linkbait — a screenshot is easy to fake. But then again, an attempt by Pakistan Telecom to block Google's YouTube did "accidentally" shutter the popular site worldwide for a few hours, so who knows.

Do not want fail? Why then, can has win, say the folks behind the curtains at Flickr, Digg, Media Temple, and StumbleUpon. Six of them showed up at a panel organized by Kevin Rose to explain how to make websites that stay online, more or less. Being a not very clever gossip, I just listened in for the quips. Oh, and the drama. Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg almost didn't make it. Check out how his fellow panelists updated the lineup right before he showed up.

Here's New York Governor Eliot Spitzer apologizing for, well, no doubt you've heard. The scandal hasn't yet brought down Spitzer, but it did lay NYTimes.com low for a while.

The development kit for the iPhone has been released to the wild and Apple's servers are getting slammed by people looking to download it. I can barely get through to the info page and am having no luck actually downloading the SDK. I guess Steve Jobs should have gotten Amazon's S3 storage service.

The TED conference is over, leaving uninvited tech journalists with 51 weeks to find something else to complain about. Its favored attendees are no doubt reminiscing about rubbing shoulders with John Cusack, Jeff Bezos, and Marissa Mayer's boyfriend. But this year's TED left another memory — its website source code. 9rules cofounder Mike Rundle says the failure exposed a database password, among other things. A suggestion for TED organizer Chris Anderson: Instead of complaining about having your attendee list published, why not make sure your website is secure?

A tipster writes from the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami: "the twitter architect is on stage. his phone keeps ringing cause twitter keeps going down." And it's still down.

Twitter broke down last night. And, judging by this screencap video clip from Jeremy Banks, yes, it made the site way more fun than normal.

Twitter experienced a serious bug tonight — one that had users logging in and sending updates as other people. It wasn't hacked, as some suggested. Cofounder Biz Stone initially described the problem as a "timeline oddity," and then fessed up: He'd rolled out an update to the microblogging service that didn't work. What I'd like to know: Does it really matter? This sounds way more fun than regular Twitter.

Yesterday morning, Microsoft's Hotmail and many other Windows Live services were knocked offline, but came back after a few hours. Tonight, I tried to go to hotmail.com and got the above error message after more than a dozen redirects.

I tried to send an email to New York Times columnist David Pogue, but I failed. It appears that Google's Gmail has been blacklisted by the Sorbs spam-blocking system. At the moment, Sorbs claims to be in a "maintenance period." Pogue's email provider could be blocking all mail because it can't reach Sorbs — but why would it be down for maintenance in the middle of the day? See the full error message after the jump and tell me if you can figure it out. In the meantime, David, call me? Everybody sing! Let the sound of your voice turn winter to spring.