Hope your blog post didn't just make the front page of Digg.com! The site is offline — in the middle of the day no less — while "changes" are made. We've got no idea what the changes might be, but unexplained downtimes in the middle of a business day suggests an unplanned outage. Got the scoop? Shoot us an email at tips@valleywag.com.
Last week, after the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld, my iPhone stopped downloading Web pages and sending text messages. I thought it was just a temporary glitch, but after two days, I realized there was a serious problem. I tracked down a thread on AT&T's help forums, and learned that the problem was my prepaid plan:
In November of last year, one of Rackspace's data centers went offline for several hours. One of the companies affected was Chicago-based 37Signals, makers of fancy collaboration software used mostly by Valley companies (including this publication). This morning, 37Signals went offline again — we made a joke about Rackspace in our post, but it seems we were more prescient than we realized. 37Signals is blaming the outage on Rackspace.
Web host DreamHost continues to overcharge customers, some of whose credit cards were already maxed out by the error, one of them tells us. And if DreamHost's initial apologies were bad, the company's communications are worse now. As of two days ago, they stopped altogether. Meanwhile, irate customers are piling on in the comments.
When Website-hoster Rackspace went down last fall, 37signals, the maker of Web-based collaboration software called the calamity a "perfect storm" and said it "will be using this situation as both a wake-up call and a learning experience." Well, somebody hit the snooze button. 37signals' suite of software services are down , leaving many of the Valley's startups — Valleywag included — without crucial collaboration as the day begins. Anybody up for making it a four-day weekend? Update: Darn. 37signals is back up. Do I still have to work?
Web hosting firm DreamHost accidentally overcharged its customers by $7.5 million. Then it sent this email as an apology. Like with its apology blog post, written in "lulzy hipster prose," some customers didn't take the email's tone well. But most are just upset to have their credit cards inadvertently maxed out, according to one customer who contacted Valleywag.
My boss, Nick Denton, may be banned from Facebook, for posting photos of Emily Brill, daughter of entrepreneur Steve Brill. Insiders at the social network tell me that they have considered similar sanctions against me, especially after I posted the story of Facebook PR chief Brandee Barker befriending her Microsoft counterpart, Adam Sohn, shortly before Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook. In solidarity, I'll now take a similar risk by posting this charming photo of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, taken while the two were goofing off during a BusinessWeek photo shoot.
So my boss is at Macworld right now and he's expecting Twitter's Jack Dorsey to take the stage in a matter of minutes. Of course, you should be hearing about this from him in our liveblog of the event. But we used a Twitter embed. And it's broken. And, depending on when you're visiting the 'Wag, it's either not working or loading really slow. Break a leg, Jack!
Millions of text messages were sent simultaneously at midnight on New Year's. Many were delayed, or didn't arrive at all. A delay in holiday greetings is not a big deal, but what about during a real emergency? Emergency personnel and government officials are automatically given priority on landline and cellular networks, leaving the average consumer in the lurch. After 9/11, cell-phone traffic in New York was at a standstill for days. Cellular networks, like highways, aren't designed to have everyone use them at once. When everyone tries to make a call at once, for a holiday or emergency, communication breaks down. The communications infrastructure, as it is currently designed, will never be able to handle calling patterns thousands of times heavier than normal. Your best bet? Send an IM. (Photo by PhotoOptik)
Rackspace's Web-hosting operation says that the increase in online shopping this month will increase "pressure" on websites. "The slightest delay in navigating a website could cause a customer to make a purchase at a competing site," says Rackspace. Yes, that could be an inconvenience. Sort of like Rackspace's pricey servers going offline again and again. [Web Host Industry News]
A relatively harmless worm has rampaged through Google's social network, Orkut. You probably haven't noticed. That's because Orkut, while popular in Brazil and India, is an also-ran in the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of Orkut users saw their accounts overwhelmed by spam on their "scrapbooks," Orkut's equivalent of Facebook's Wall.
"It is possible that the application does not exist." Well, granted, if you took enough math and philosophy classes, that statement is 100 percent correct.
Someone, somewhere is hot-swapping servers like there's no tomorrow. Because if Steve Jobs gets this error, there won't be a tomorrow.
Users of Vonage's internet telephone service have been reporting a major service failure, ongoing since Friday. The problems are varied, but it comes down to this: Vonage seems to be missing the "phone" and "service" parts of "phone service." In some cases, incoming calls are not connecting. Vonage is forwarding the attempted calls to subscriber landlines and cellphones, but repeatedly, and late. As a result, the call forwarding feature becomes a series of phantom calls clogging up the customer's only reliable phone service. Some are reporting no service at all.
On one of the biggest days of the year for the stock markets, when the Federal Reserve Bank announced its interest rate changes, CNBC's ticker went offline for almost 10 minutes. Ah, I loves me some live television. "Do we have to mention the Fed meeting again? We've had enough of that."
