WebProNews

Tag: Outages

  • Kim Kardashian Says She Broke the App Store with Her New KIMOJI App

    Kim Kardashian says her new specialty emoji app, KIMOJI, broke the App Store.

    “Apple, I’m so sorry I broke your App Store!!!” she tweeted.

    “I can’t believe so many people downloaded my KIMOJI app that it affected the entire app store!”

    “We worked so hard on this app & we know there are some issues due to the massive downloads that the whole tech team is so working on!”

    People on Twitter did report that they were having trouble finding the app.

    But some are skeptical that she actually caused an App Store crash.

    Whether her new was so popular it crashed Apple’s App Store or not, the app is currently at the top of the list in paid apps.

    The KIMOJI app offers “access to 250+ exclusive emoji and sticker designs – along with an integrated QWERTY keyboard – all of which work with your favorite messaging apps: iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, email, and more.” Most of the emojis in the app are Kardashian-based.

  • Google’s Apology for World Series Fiber Outage: Two Free Days

    In terms of worst times for an outage, Game 1 of the World Series is pretty high on the list.

    Unfortunately, that’s what happened to many in the Kansas City area as their Royals took on the New York Mets Tuesday night.

    Fans flocked to Twitter to express outrage, disbelief, horror, and sadness over the fact that their Google Fiber service had crapped the bed for a couple of innings (some experienced a longer outage).

    Google quickly apologized, saying, “We’re so sorry about the outage in KC. We know it couldn’t have happened at a worse time, and we’re working as quickly as we can to fix it.”

    But apologies aren’t a game rewind. And it looks like Google has taken a proactive approach to keep one of its few Google Fiber locations happy.

    Via PC Mech, here’s the email Google sent out to customer in the Kansas City market:

    I just wanted to reach out to say how much we regret yesterday’s service outage. It occurred at an important moment for Kansas City: Game 1 of the World Series.

    Many people on our local team are from Kansas City, and we love our Royals. We let you down, and we let our community down. We will do better.

    Our first priority was to get you back online as quickly as possible. And we’re taking immediate steps to ensure this type of issue doesn’t happen again. We know you put your trust in us to be there when you need us.

    Although we can’t bring back the moments you missed, we would like to offer you two days of service credited to your next monthly bill.

    If you have questions, please contact our support team.

    Kelly Carnago
    Head of Google Fiber Business Operations, Kansas City

    What is two free days of Fiber worth? Gigabit + TV is $130 a month, so about $8.66.

    Still, it’s a nice gesture. It won’t remove all the salt, but it should help. I can think of a few other providers who’ve never offered me anything after an outage.

  • Facebook Is Down, Again

    For the second time in a week, Facebook is down for many users worldwide.

    According to reports on Twitter, the outage struck at around 3pm ET.

    The hashtag #facebookdown is the #1 trending topic right now, so it appears as though this is a major outage.

    The last major Facebook outage took place on September 24th.

    Everyone is asked to remain calm, and stay indoors. This will pass. Play around on Instagram for a few minutes. Please don’t call 911. They can’t help you.

  • App Store, iTunes, Apple Music, and Other Apple Services Down for Some

    Many Apple services are experiencing a pretty major outage today, as the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, the iBooks Store, iTunes, Beats 1 Radio, and more are all down for some users.

    According to Apple, it’s only affecting some users.

    “All Store Services – Some users are affected,” says Apple. “Users are experiencing a problem with the services listed above. We are investigating and will update the status as more information becomes available.”

    The outages were first reported by Apple just before 10am ET.

    Screen Shot 2015-07-21 at 11.52.39 AM

    As for the cause, the prevailing theory is that Apple’s systems buckled under the weight of the VMA announcement traffic, as Apple and MTV had partnered to reveal them via Beats 1.

    Developing…

  • Facebook Down, Slow for Some Users

    It’s not just you. It appears that Facebook is down or slow to load for many users.

    The outage began around 9am EDT.

    Both DownDetector and DownRightNow are reporting liely service disruptions and reports out outages.

    Plus, users are complaining on Twitter, as they typically do.

    We found that Facebook was slow to load if it loaded at all on desktop, but mobile seems to be working fine. We’ll update accordingly.

  • App Store, iTunes Store Down for All Users All Morning

    If you’re trying to make a purchase on iTunes or attempting to download an app in the App Store, you’ve probably noticed that it’s not working.

    That’s because Apple is suffering some major outages this morning – from before 5am EST.

    The outages have been reported on Twitter all morning – for at least six hours. But it wasn’t until very recently that Apple updated its systems status page to reflect the major outage.

    As of right now, Apple is reporting that the App Store, the iBooks Store, the iTunes Store, and the Mac App Store are all down for everyone.

    Earlier today, other Apple systems like the Apple Support Page were down – but it appears to be up and running at the moment.

    According to reports, various Apple Stores have had to go the pen and paper route this morning.

  • Dumb People Keep Calling 911 When Facebook Goes Down

    Apparently, people didn’t get the memo the last time this happened.

    As you may know, Facebook and Instagram suffered a major outage on Monday. It lasted about an hour. It was devastating.

    During this time, instead of doing literally anything other than calling 911 to report the Facebook outage, people actually called 911 to report the Facebook outage. Again.

    CBS San Francisco reports that five idiots called 911 to report that Facebook and Instagram weren’t working. Oh, and someone even called back to bitch.

    “Our lines are dedicated to handle life and death calls, and even though Facebook is important to a lot of people, it’s not a matter of life and death when it stops working,” a dispatcher told the site. “One caller even called back to tell me I was being rude because I told her it wasn’t a life threatening emergency.”

    I have baby photos to like. This is serious.

    As I’ve alluded to, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Facebook suffered a major outage last August, and so many people called 911 that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had to issue a public plea. Please, pretty please, quit clogging up our lines with calls about Facebook.

    After initial reports that Facebook had been hit with some sort of cyberattack, the company issued a statement saying the whole this was self-inflicted.

    “Earlier today many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems. We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone,” said Facebook in a statement.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Yahoo Mail Experiences Technical Difficulties

    Yahoo Mail has been experiencing some technical difficulties with service disruption for some users due to the severing of an underwater cable, which the company says was caused by a third party.

    This morning at 9:45 PST, Yahoo said, “The underwater cable cut affecting our network has now been located. Testing and repairs are currently taking place. The Yahoo engineering team continues to monitor email traffic. Thank you for your patience.”

    In another update, it said, “Some customers may have receive[d] an error when attempting to access their Yahoo mail or their Yahoo Small Business Email account webmail. Due to this impacting both Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Business Mail customers, our engineering team are working towards a resolution as quickly as possible.”

    Service has been disrupted throughout the weekend. In an update as early as Thursday afternoon, Yahoo said, “We are aware that Yahoo Mail is slow or inaccessible for some of our users. The issues were a result of an underwater fiber cable cut, caused by a third party while fixing a separate cable. The engineering team has rerouted email traffic to mitigate accessibility issues. A cable repair ship has been mobilized and will be at the site this weekend. We apologize for the inconvenience as we certainly understand email is a critical service for our customers.”

    Here’s what the Twitterverse is saying about Yahoo Mail:


    Further updates will be made here as they become available.

    Image via Yahoo

  • Google DoubleClick Outage May Have Cost Publishers Big Time

    Google’s DoubleClick ad network suffered a major outage today. It reportedly began at around 9:40 AM Eastern, and lasted a little less than an hour.

    Everything should be back to normal now. Google just tweeted this:

    While everything may be back to normal, and an hour without ads may not seem like a big deal, it could actually mean a pretty substantial amount of money down the toilet.

    According to AdWeek, the potential amount lost could be as much as $2 million. Lauren Johnson writes:

    Google’s third-party ad network brought in $3.4 billion last quarter, according to the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s third quarter report. That equates into $1.5 million per hour when applying back-of-the-napkin math, which also suggests the damage could have been as much as $2 million this morning.

    Many, many websites utilize DoubleClick ads, including AdWeek itself, as well as The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Forbes, The Guardian, and countless others. It’s not hard to see why an hour of downtime could add up quickly.

    Image via Google

  • Facebook Down for Some Users

    It’s not just you – Facebook is down for many users. The outage appears to have hit around 3:45 EST.

    This is the fourth such outage for the social network since June. The last one happened at the beginning of August.

    This isn’t just frustrating for Facebook users, as Facebook itself suffers from extended outages. Reports indicate that a 20-30 minute outage can cost the company over $500,000 in ad revenue.

    Frustrated or not, whatever you do, please don’t call 911 about it.

    We’ll update this accordingly…

  • Instagram Down for Some Users on Mobile and Web

    Instagram appears to be suffering an outage, as users have taken to Twitter to express their frustration.

    Many are receiving error messages when trying to load their feeds or access other information.

    The outage appears to be serious enough that “Why Is Instagram” is currently trending nationwide on Twitter.

    The outage is affecting the Instagram mobile app as well as the desktop site.

    Facebook, who owns Instagram, suffered a major outage of its own earlier this month.

    More updates to come…

  • Facebook Outage Led To 3% Decline In Traffic To News Sites [Report]

    Last Friday, Facebook went down for somewhere between a half an hour and an hour for a lot of users. According to CharBeat, this led to a decline of 3% in overall web traffic to news sites, and an 8.5% decline in mobile traffic.

    As a result of the outage, people visited news sites themselves, rather than relying on their News Feeds to highlight the stories they should’ve been consuming. ChartBeat’s Josh Schwartz digs into the impact the outage had on “dark social” traffic and what people did while the social network was down here (via MarketingLand).

    “Our brief world without Facebook looked a bit different, albeit in predictable ways,” concludes Schwartz. “Significantly less news was consumed on phones, slightly more homepages were visited on desktops, and 30 minutes later, when Facebook came back online, traffic returned to normal.”

    While this is only a small sample of what a world without Facebook could look like for publishers, this recent report from Shareaholic drives home just how much sites rely on Facebook for traffic these days. No other social site even comes close to driving the referrals Facebook does.

    VentureBeat determined that the outage cost the company about $20,000 per minute, based on its ad revenue from Q2.

    Image via Twitter

  • Idiots Reportedly Called 911 When Facebook Was Down

    What the hell is wrong with people?

    About four hours ago, Facebook went down. Like really down. Many users worldwide were unable to access the social network at all, and those who did saw a service operating at a well-below optimal level. The outage lasted for as much as an hour for some – it was pretty bad. Productivity soared. Zuckerberg wept.

    Apparently, the struggle was so real, that people called in to report it as an emergency – at least according to Sgt. Burton Brink of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

    But wait – a wrinkle:

    Despite the LAPD’s insistence that no calls were made regarding the Facebook outage, Sgt. Brink maintained his position:

    Of course, it’s possible that calls came in to specific Sheriff station, or someone missed some calls. What motivation would Sgt. Brink have to make this up?

    I’ll choose to believe that people are that dumb. Because people are that dumb.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Facebook Down for Some Users, Slow for Others

    It’s not just you. Facebook is down for some users, and for many who can access the social network things are moving pretty slowly.

    Just ask Twitter.

    This is not the only major outage for Facebook in recent memory. Facebook went down twice over a period of two days back in June.

    These outages are not just frustrating for Facebook users. Facebook itself suffers from extended outages. Reports indicate that June’s 20-30 minute outage cost the company over $500,000 in ad revenue.

  • Facebook Down for the Second Time in Two Days

    UPDATE: It’s back as of 4:47 pm EST. The outage lasted less than 10 minutes. The world can start spinning again.

    It’s not just you – Facebook is currently experiencing a service outage.

    This is the second major outage that Facebook has suffered in the past couple of days. Early Thursday morning, Facebook was down for a large portion of its users for about 20 minutes. That was the longest downtime Facebook had experienced since 2012.

    That’s what most of us are seeing right now.

    And it’s not just frustrating to Facebook users. Facebook itself suffers from extended outages. Reports indicate that the most recent 20-30 minute outage costs the company over $500,000 in ad revenue.

    We’ll update when we learn more.

  • Feedly And Evernote Go Down, Hit By DDoS Attacks

    No, it’s not just you.

    Feedly is down because it’s been attacked. In fact, both Feedly and Evernote were hit by denial of service attacks. Evernote says it’s back up and running now, but notes that there could still be some hiccups in service. Feedly is still down.

    Here’s a sequence of tweets from Evernote explaining its situation:

    As noted, Feedly is still getting itself back in order:

    In that blog post, Feedly says, “Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can.”

    The company says it’s working with other victims of the same group (presumably Evernote), and with law enforcement.

    “We want to apologize for the inconvenience,” it says. ” Please know that you data is safe and you will be able to re-access your feedly as soon as the attack is neutralized.”

    Feedly will update its blog with any new information on the situation. That post was written roughly four hours ago.

    Update: Feedly just updated its blog to say: “We’re making some changes to our infrastructure that will allow us to bring feedly back online. However, these things take some time to put into place and it may still be a few more hours before service is restored. Thank you so much for your patience and for sticking with us. Remember, none of your data was compromised or lost in this attack.” That was at 9:25 AM Eastern.

    Update 2: Feeds appear to be working for some people now (myself included).

    Image via Feedly

  • YouTube Is Down For Many Users

    YouTube Is Down For Many Users

    Update: We got this statement from a YouTube spokesperson: “Some people encountered errors, or a slower than normal experience on YouTube today. We worked quickly to address the issue and fixed the problem. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this caused.”

    Nothing on the embed code so far.

    YouTube has been acting weird for the past hour or so. Users are getting a variety of errors when visiting YouTube.com, and embedded videos are also frequently not working.

    Here’s what we’re seeing from the site sometimes:

    Other times we’re being prompted to enter a CAPTCHA to enter the site. Some are seeing “500 Internal Server Error…Sorry, something went wrong…”

    Sometimes it just works like normal.

    A lot of people are tweeting about problems though:

    On Tuesday, YouTube’s embed code started acting weird. It has been showing a “)” at the end, which when used, puts that extra character after the video on your page. That has continued into today despite people tweeting at YouTube about the issue, and me asking them about it. We haven’t heard back yet.

    We also reached out to YouTube about today’s outage, and will update accordingly.

    Images via YouTube

  • Gmail Is Down, Guys. Stock Up and Bunker Down

    UPDATE 2:22 pm EST: IT’S BACK! – but with some kinks. Gmail is currently unable to access contacts and Google+ still seems to be down for many users.

    It’s not just you – Gmail is down for users all over the world. Most users who are experiencing the outage are receiving a temporary (500) error:

    “We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes,” says the message from Google.

    By the Twitter reaction, this one looks to be a pretty significant outage.

    Also down? Google+.

    Sure, this is a problem for a lot of people. But just think, it could be worse…

  • Mayer Apologizes For Yahoo Mail Issues, Yahoo Still Working On Them

    As reported last week, the Yahoo Mail woes continued with a massive wave of outages resulting in a lot of angry users (as if there weren’t enough of them already). The company also took some flak in the media for how its PR department handled the situation.

    Late on Friday, CEO Marissa Mayer took to the Yahoo corporate blog to apologize and explain the situation. Perhaps too little too late for some users, but at least it’s something.

    She begins by explaining how important Yahoo Mail is and how frustrating of a week it had been, before offering an explanation of the outage:

    On Monday, December 9th at 10:27 p.m. PT, our network operating center alerted the Mail engineering team to a specific hardware outage in one of our storage systems serving 1% of our users. The Mail team immediately started working with the storage engineers to restore access and move to our back-up systems, estimating that full recovery would be complete by 1:30 p.m. PT on Tuesday.

    However, the problem was a particularly rare one, and the resolution for the affected accounts was nuanced since different users were impacted in different ways. Some of the affected users were unable to access their accounts, instead seeing an outdated “scheduled maintenance” page which was a confusing and incorrect message (this has since been corrected and updated). Further, messages sent to those accounts during this time were not delivered, but held in a queue.

    Over the remainder of the week, we worked around the clock to restore access and all messages to inboxes. This has included restoring IMAP access for people using other email programs like Outlook or Apple Mail to access their Yahoo Mail.

    As of Friday afternoon, she said, access had been restored for almost everyone, and the backlog of messages had been delivered. She said they would continue to work on rolling out IMAP access and to fully restore inbox state (like which folders messages were placed in, which were starred, etc.).

    She closed the post by saying that Yahoo Mail’s overall uptime is 99.9%, but that they will work to prevent issues from happening again.

    “We really let you down this week. We can, and we ill, do better in the future, she said.

    The Yahoo Mail status page offered an update on Sunday night, saying that the engineering team had been working over the weekend and making “steady progress” on restoring access to messages for affected users and correcting inbox state. They noted that some timestamps may not appear correctly on some messages.

    Are you a Yahoo Mail user? Is everything back to normal for you yet?

    Image: Yahoo

  • Pinterest Down, Users Having Login Issues

    Pinterest Down, Users Having Login Issues

    Uh oh. With hosts scrambling to come up with that killer recipe for their Thanksgiving dinners and early holiday shoppers looking for great gift ideas, Pinterest is suffering an outage.

    Users are currently having issues logging in to the site. According to Pinterest, even if they do, they may be having trouble viewing their profiles.

    The last major outage for Pinterest occurred back in September.

    We’ll let you know when Pinterest has resolved this issue.

  • LivingSocial Still Down, Now Delaying Email Distribution

    Daily deals site LivingSocial has been down for more than a day, and the company is blaming it on an internal issue.

    LivingSocial.com went down Tuesday afternoon, as did all LivingSocial mobile apps. Although the website says that it is temporarily down of maintenance, the company is revealing that there was in fact a problem that caused the outage. According to LivingSocial, the problem is not external and users shouldn’t worry that any of their personal info has been compromised.

    “We can let you know now that it is the result of an internal issue, and there is nothing to indicate that this was the result of any external factors. Also, there is nothing that leads us to think that any consumer or merchant data, or financial information has been compromised,” says LivingSocial.

    Although this issue may not be related to a hack, it wouldn’t be the first time LivingSocial has experienced such an intrusion. Back in April, the company announced that they had been hacked and it had exposed over 50 million users emails and passwords – but no credit card info.

    LivingSocial says that the have delayed email distribution and that they have “revised promotion schedules to accommodate merchants for the disruption.” You can still access existing deals via email, however, if you already received them.

    Image via LivingSocial