WebProNews

Tag: Outages

  • Facebook Down for Some, Users Unable to Post, Like, Comment, Etc.

    Facebook is experiencing issues that are preventing many users from using many aspects of the service, including status updates, liking, commenting, and more.

    A quick search of Twitter reveals that the issue is widespread, and the hashtag #facebookdown is trending globally.

    We’re experiencing issues here – this is message we get when attempting to post a status update:

    And we’re also getting an error message when we attempt to like or comment on posts:

    We still have access to Facebook.com and Facebook mobile, but the site is slow to load.

    Facebook has yet to make any statement on the outage, but we’ve reached out and will let you know when we hear back.

  • Gmail Disruption Affected 29% of All Messages, Google Apologizes

    Google is apologizing for Monday’s Gmail service disruption, which they say affected 29% of all message sent during the period. During the disruption, messages were slow to deliver and some users had an issue downloading attachments.

    Google first reported the issue at 10:25 am EST Monday, and did not fully resolve it until 10:00 pm.

    According to the company, most of the delayed messages weren’t really delayed for that long – an average time of just 2.6 seconds. But some users suffered a greater headache:

    The impact on users’ Gmail experience varied widely. Most messages were unaffected—71% of messages had no delay, and of the remaining 29%, the average delivery delay was just 2.6 seconds. However, about 1.5% of messages were delayed more than two hours. Users who attempted to download large attachments on affected messages encountered errors. Throughout the event, Gmail remained otherwise available — users could log in, read messages which had been delivered, send mail, and access other features.

    “We’d like to start by apologizing – we realize that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn’t deliver,” says Sabrina Farmer, Gmail’s Senior Site Reliability Engineering Manager.

    “Our top priority is ensuring that Gmail users get the experience they expect: fast, highly-available email, anytime they want it. We’re taking steps to ensure that there is sufficient network capacity, including backup capacity for Gmail, even in the event of a rare dual network failure. We also plan to make changes to make Gmail message delivery more resilient to a network capacity shortfall in the unlikely event that one occurs in the future.”

    A Gmail outage is always a big deal, and it’s a giant frustration when it happens at the start of a work week. For the most part, Gmail’s disruption was limited to a small portion of messages. At the time, Google also reported problems with Google Docs and Google presentations – both of which are now up and running smoothly.

    Image via Google

  • Gmail Suffers Service Disruption Affecting Small Portion of Users

    If you’re experience issues with Gmail, it’s probably not your fault. Google has confirmed that the service is suffering a small “disruption” that is affecting a small portion of users.

    Google first reported the service disruption at 10:25 am EST on Monday, saying that they were investigating reports of an outage. At 11:45 am EST, Google said that “the delivery of some messages is being delayed and attachments may fail to download.”

    They also said that it was affecting only 0.024% of the Gmail user base, but judging by the reaction on Twitter is may be a little more widespread than that.

    Either way, Google says that they’re on it.

    According to the Google Apps Dashboard, both Google Docs and Google Presentations are also experiencing a service disruption.

    Well, not exactly. But it does make things a bit more difficult. Happy Monday, everyone.

  • Matt Cutts Talks About Site Downtime’s Impact On Rankings

    Google has released a new Webmaster Help video with Matt Cutts addressing the question: If my site goes down for a day, does that affect my rankings?

    Sound familiar? I thought so too. Earlier this year, Cutts did a similar video addressing the question: How do I get my search rankings back after my site has been down?

    Here’s the new one:

    “Well, if it was just for a day, you should be in pretty good shape,” says Cutts. “You know, if your host is down for two weeks, then there’s a better indicator that the website is actually down, and we don’t want to send users to a website that’s actually down, but we do try to compensate for websites that are transiently or sporadically down, and you know, make a few allowances. We try to come back 24 hours later or something like that, so if it was only just a short period of down time, I wouldn’t really worry about that.”

    He adds that you might want to drop into the Google Webmaster forum and look around a little. He notes that there was recently a day where Googlebot itself was having trouble fetching pages. It usually has “pretty good reliability,” though, he says.

  • Getting Google Rankings Back After Site Downtime

    Getting Google Rankings Back After Site Downtime

    The latest Google Webmaster Help video deals with getting your site’s rankings back after experiencing some downtime.

    Google’s Matt Cutts will often provides answers to his own questions in these videos. This time the question comes from Googler Pierre Far, a Webmaster Trends analyst at Google UK. The question is:

    My website was down for a couple of days and now has lost all of its Google rankings. What can I do to get them back?

    Basically, Cutts’ answer is just to put the site back up, make sure it’s reliable, and make sure the pages that were there before are still there.

    “There’s a tension at Google where if a page goes away (maybe there’s a 404), we don’t know if it’s really gone away or whether that page will be back,” he says. “Sometimes there’s a server time out, you know, the server is kind of slow. And so, on one hand, you don’t want to keep showing a page that would be a bad user experience, like it’s really gone away. On the other hand, it’s very common for websites to go down for an hour, two hours, a day, two days…and so you also want to give the benefit of the doubt, so you can revisit those pages and see whether they’ve gone up.”

    “So we do have different varying time periods where we basically allow, if a domain looks like it’s gone away, but it comes back – you know, it’s back online, then we just sort of say, ‘Okay, it was a transient error,’ so the short and simple advice is just make sure you put the website back up the way it was, and hopefully things should recover relatively quickly,” says Cutts.

    This may not be quite the answer you were looking for, but that’s the one Google is giving. It would certainly be interesting to know more about these “varying periods of time”.

  • Feedly Goes Down As Demand From Google Reader Users Surges

    As you probably know by now, Google announced last week that it is shutting down Google Reader. Meanwhile, a lot of users are experimenting with some of the alternatives, trying to find one that meets their news consumption needs. One of the more popular alternatives so far has been Feedly.

    In fact, Feedly announced on Friday that over 500,000 Google Reader users had already joined Feedly over the previous 48 hours since Google’s announcements. Pretty impressive. In fact, it’s so impressive, it leads one to wonder why Google is turning its back on all of these people. But I won’t get into all of that again here.

    I’ve been using Feedly a bit myself over the past few days. I don’t think it’s quite where it needs to be to replace Google Reader in my heart just yet, but it does seem to be a solid alternative. Unfortunately, that solidity appears to have crumbled a bit under the demand. The service is currently not running for at least some portion of its users (including myself).

    I just returned from a brief break to find the service broken, and sure enough, a lot of people are mentioning this on Twitter as well.

    On Friday, Feedly did note that keeping the site up is one of its priorities.

    “Our main priorities over the next 30 days are 1) to keep the service up, 2) listen to new users for suggestions and 3) add features weekly,” Feedly said in a blog post. “To keep the service up, we 10x our bandwidth and added new servers”

    So far, it likes there’s work to be done, but it’s not even been a week yet, so I think we can cut them some slack.

    Update: It looks like it’s back up and running, at least for me. It will be interesting to see how Feedly continues to handle the demand. I’m sure a lot more will be checking the service out from now until July when Google Reader goes away.

    Update 2: Some are still reporting that they’re having issues.

  • Google Reader Not Working For A Bunch Of People

    I couldn’t help but notice that Google Reader has been acting very weird, but now I know it’s not just me, as numerous people have been complaining about it, and several publications are now reporting on the issue.

    There’s a Google Group thread here, where people are complaining. It was started on Sunday, when user applmak wrote:

    Reader is unable to display the canonical list of unread posts to me. When I load the page, I see:

    – A shortened list of only a few unread posts (according to the total on the ‘All Items’ filter)
    – A far greater number, but a truncated post list
    – The same number, but filled with old posts
    – The correct list of posts & count.

    The biggest thing I’ve noticed has simply been read items appearing as unread.

    Google’s Matti Nescio chimed in in the thread to say that the Google Reader team has been notified of the issue, and that “someone will be looking into this.”

    It appears that some have been experiencing issues for even longer (as in earlier last week). I used it quite a bit over the weekend, and didn’t notice any issues until this morning.

    TechCrunch is saying, “The GoogleReaderpocalypse is upon us.” I’m not sure it’s as dramatic as that (at least I hope not). The piece suggests that Google doesn’t care much about this product anymore, as it has turned its focus to other things like Google+, despite a continued, solid user base (whose real size can only be speculated upon).

    It is true that Google has done little with Google Reader in recent memory, though I’d say it doesn’t really need much in the way of changes. Hopefully (and I’m sure many would agree) Google isn’t planning on shutting he service down in its next “spring cleaning” announcement.

    Google did add Google Reader to the Google Takeout menu a few months ago. I hope that’s not a sign.

  • Twitter Goes Down for the Third Time This Month

    Some Twitter users may be having some trouble accessing the site. For others, the site is running but experiencing quickness issues.

    Once again, Twitter has suffered a noteworthy outage.

    Here’s what Twitter had to say on their Status blog:

    Some users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.

    This is the third time this month that Twitter has had an outage serious enough to warrant posting about it on their Status blog. The first instance, on January 16th, was a pretty significant outage. Last Monday, the 21st, Twitter once again went down.

  • Vine Disables Twitter Sharing Just Hours After Launch

    Earlier this afternoon, Twitter unveiled Vine, a standalone iOS app for the creation and sharing of short (six-second) video clips. A video sharing experience was rumored to be in the Twitter pipeline, and it looks like this is it. Vine allows users to take short videos, and then share them on Twitter (and Facebook, too). But for Twitter, it’s a way to enrich tweets.

    Well, Vine is already broken. For the most part.

    “We’re temporarily disabling Twitter and Facebook sharing. It should be back soon. Thanks for your patience,” said Vine in a tweet.

    Of course, not being able to post the short videos to Twitter and Facebook doesn’t render the app completely useless, but it pretty much does.

    They really need to get this thing fixed, as it’s really not what you’re looking for on launch day.

  • Foursquare Is Down and They’re Investigating [UPDATED]

    UPDATE: It’s all back up. as of 11:45 am ET, making the downtime total nearly 5 hours. No explanation on what caused the outage.

    ORIGINAL ARTICLE: If you tried to check-in on Foursquare when you arrived at work this morning, you were probably disappointed. Foursquare has been down since around 7am ET.

    The company has confirmed the outage on their status blog

    The site is down and we’re investigating now. Will update as soon as we have more information. Thanks for your patience!

    About an hour after that, Foursquare posted this update:

    We’re working to identify the cause of the outage. We’ll have another update soon.

    And just five minutes ago (10:30am ET), they said that they’re “continuing to work on things.”

    The outage is affecting both their mobile apps and foursquare.com.

  • Netflix Outage Sparks Commitment To Improvement By Company

    Netflix Outage Sparks Commitment To Improvement By Company

    On Christmas Eve, Netflix experienced a widespread outage of its streaming services due to issues with Amazon Web Services. If you tried using Netflix that day, you may have noticed, though not everyone was affected (trust me, I did plenty of Netflix watching over my holiday break). If you were online at all that day, chances are you probably at least saw someone complaining about it or reports about the problem.

    Customers were affected in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Subscribers in the UK, Ireland and Nordic countries were not affected at all.

    On Monday, Netflix put a post up on its Tech Blog to explain what happened. Essentially, the disruption in streaming services was impacted by problems with Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), which routes network traffic to Netflix.

    Both companies have apologized for the outage, which began about 12:30 PM (Pacific), but “grew in scope” later in the day.

    “Netflix uses hundreds of ELBs,” explains Netflix’s Adrian Cockcroft in the blog post. “Each one supports a distinct service or a different version of a service and provides a network address that your Web browser or streaming device calls. Netflix streaming has been implemented on over a thousand different streaming devices over the last few years, and groups of similar devices tend to depend on specific ELBs. Requests from devices are passed by the ELB to the individual servers that run the many parts of the Netflix application. Out of hundreds of ELBs in use by Netflix, a handful failed, losing their ability to pass requests to the servers behind them. None of the other AWS services failed, so our applications continued to respond normally whenever the requests were able to get through.”

    The Netflix site itself was up and running throughout the incident, so customers could still access some functionality, and new customers could sign up (Update: Some claim they have been unable to use various site functionalities). According to the company, streaming from Macs and PCs was only slightly reduced from normal.

    “Even though Netflix streaming for many devices was impacted, this wasn’t an immediate blackout,” says Cockcroft. “Those devices that were already running Netflix when the ELB problems started were in many cases able to continue playing additional content.”

    The company says it is working on ways to extend its resiliency to handle regional outages.

    “It is still early days for cloud innovation and there is certainly more to do in terms of building resiliency in the cloud,” says Cockcroft. “In 2012 we started to investigate running Netflix in more than one AWS region and got a better gauge on the complexity and investment needed to make these changes. We have plans to work on this in 2013.”

    On a related note, Netflix says it sees higher usage on Christmas Day, with increasing streaming rates until people go back to school and work.

  • Tumblr Apologizes for Huge Outage That Cost Bloggers “Almost 100 Million Views”

    If you operate a Tumblr blog, you’re probably aware that the site experienced a major outage yesterday. After experiencing intermittent errors and slow loading times on a number of pages, Tumblr decided to take down the whole site “in order to resolve the network issue.”

    That resulted in 4 hours of down time and a loss of nearly 100 million views to user blogs, according to the company. They’ve issued an apology this morning for the outage

    Here’s the full Tumblr staff post:

    Our engineering processes seriously failed this afternoon and cost you and your blogs nearly 4 hours of downtime and almost 100 million views.

    Painfully, this isn’t the first time this winter I’ve had to give you similar news.

    When incidents like this happen, our entire engineering team comes online to support the recovery as needed. Immediately after, we begin taking every measure to protect from the uncovered issue in the future.

    We are constantly working to shore up our processes and solidify the stability of this quickly growing network, even more so as we’ve fallen behind the last few weeks.

    Tumblr’s success is supporting your success, and we take this mission very seriously.

    Tumblr was hit with a major outage back in October, too. And earlier this month, the site was plagued by a worm that ended up hijacking thousands of blogs.

    Why issue an apology for a 4-hour outage you might ask? Apart from the fact that Tumblr often does this whenever there is a sustained problem, the site is one of the biggest in the U.S. Late last month they announced that based on Quantcast data, they were currently the 9th biggest site in the country. Globally, Tumblr has a monthly audience of 170 million people.

  • Gawker And BuzzFeed Turn To Tumblr After Being Taken Down By Hurricane Sandy

    Update: BuzzFeed Director of Communications Alice Suh tells WebProNews, “BuzzFeed is up and running after the hard work of our team who worked all night bring our servers back to life. We are no longer operating off the compromised data center.”

    The digital world has not been immune to the effects of Hurricane Sandy, as some sites went down thanks to the storm. Two major forces on the web, Gawker (which includes Gawker, LifeHacker, Gizmodo, io9, Kotaku, DeadSpin, Jalopnik and Jezebel) and BuzzFeed, both saw outages.

    Buzzfeed appears to be back up and running, but still has more work to do. A message on the site says, “We’re Up! But still recovering from Sandy…” The site points you to its Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook pages, but there is fresh content coming in on the site.

    Gawker sites, on the other hand, are still down, displaying a message that says, “Our New York City data center is still offline thanks to Hurricane Sandy. We are working as quickly as possible to restore the full site, but in the interim you can view updates at http://updates.gawker.com.” For other Gawker sites, replace updates.gawker.com with updates.nameofsite.com.

    Both BuzzFeed and Gawker have relied on Tumblr to post content for its users. Gawker’s “updates” sites are on Tumblr, and the actual sites are redirecting to their Tumblr counterparts, where they continue to post fresh content.

    Mathew Ingram wrote a few days ago about “what Tumblr can tell us about the future of media.” It was an interesting piece, but I don’t think this is what he had in mind. Perhaps Hurricane Sandy has proven another point about Tumblr. It’s a way for publications to reach readers even if their primary platform is unavailable.

    Of course, that requires Tumblr to be up and running too. Last week, the service had some downtime of its own.

  • Google App Engine Has Outage Issues

    Google App Engine is experiencing issues today, causing problems with various services across the web. There have been numerous reports of various outages.

    Business Insider mentions Instagram, SlideShare, Sina Weibo, and Orkut. There have also been reports of Dropbox and Tumblr having issues, indicating that the problem may be even larger.

    Google has posted a series of updates about the issue in Google Groups:

    11:28 AM: App Engine is currently experiencing serving issues. The team is actively working on restoring the service to full strength. Please follow this thread for updates.

    12:33 PM: At approximately 7:30am Pacific time this morning, Google began experiencing slow performance and dropped connections from one of the components of App Engine. The symptoms that service users would experience include slow response and an inability to connect to services. We currently show that a majority of App Engine users and services are affected. Google engineering teams are investigating a number of options for restoring service as quickly as possible, and we will provide another update as information changes, or within 60 minutes.

    1:51 PM: We are continuing work to correct the ongoing issues with App Engine. Operation has been restored for some services, while others continue to see slow response times and elevated error rates. The malfunction appears to be limited to a single component which routes requests from users to the application instance they are using, and does not affect the application instances themselves.

    We’ll post another status update as more information becomes available, and/or no later than one hour from now.

    Click on the Google thread link above for updates on the issues as more time passes.

  • Reddit Down for Some Users, Blames “Network-Related Issue”

    Reddit Down for Some Users, Blames “Network-Related Issue”

    UPDATE: It appears that a problem with Amazon Web Services EC2 in Northern Virginia. You can check out AWS’ Service Health Dashboard here.

    Those of you looking to browse reddit right now may be out of luck. That’s because the site is down, and has been for at least a couple of hours.

    According to Reddit Status on Twitter, the site began having problems around noon ET, and those problems expanded to taking down the whole site a little past 1:30 pm. Reddit says a “network-related issue” is to blame.

    What’s bad news for reddit and redditors is good news for a couple of other sites. The “reddit is down” page includes a couple of suggestions for people while the site is down. At the bottom right-hand corner there’s a link to imgur and the scrolling message asks users if they happened to see today’s XKCD comic yet.

    It also tells you just how impatient you are, by noting how many times you’ve refreshed. Thanks, reddit, but we already know how lost we are without you.

  • StumbleUpon Not Working For Some Users

    Update 2: We’ve finally received word from StumbleUpon. A spokesperson tells WebPronews, “We’ve had a few outages this morning that have affected some users. We are working on it now. We should be up and running for everyone soon.”

    As of the time of this writing, everything appears to be working as normal from here.

    StumbleUpon has been experiencing some major issues for hours. Currently, I personally can’t get past an error message at StumbleUpon.com, though some can actually access the site as normal. The StumbleUpon bar (for Chrome) appears to be working, in that you can Stumble through content (this was not working before). Stumble buttons on websites are not loading. Su.pr, StumbleUpon’s URL-shortening service is still not working. Trying to submit a new piece of content to StumbleUpon is not working. When trying to “like” a piece of content already in StumbleUpon’s system, I’m getting a network error.

    We’ve reached out to the company for comment, and will update if and when we receive a response.

    Update: StumbleUpon has acknowledged the issues. The company says in a Facebook post:

    Hi Stumblers!

    We have some problems right now which may be affecting your Stumbling. Sorry about that. )o:

    Our Ops and Engineers are on the case and doing their thing. Normal service will be resumed just as soon as possible.

    Either way, service appears to have improved to some extent over the past 30 minutes or so. Earlier, our analytics were showing zero active visitors from StumbleUpon, which is very uncommon, burt more recently, we started seeing some come in (though still fewer than normal).

    Is It Down Right Now? has the following to say about it:

    We have tried pinging Stumbleupon website using our server and the website returned the above results. If Stumbleupon.com is down for us too there is nothing you can do except waiting. Probably the server is overloaded, down or unreachable because of a network problem or a a website maintenance is in progress.

    If the site is live and yet you cant load the page, try one of the below solutions:

    • Reload the site directly from the Internet. This can be achieved by pressing CTRL + F5 keys at the same time on your favourite browser (Firefox, Chrome, Explorer, etc.)
    • Temporarily disable your computers firewall and close any anti-virus software that may be running in the background.
    • Clear your DNS cache to make sure that it is not an ISP specific issue. (Start > Command Prompt > ipconfig /flushdns)
    • Use a public DNS service such as OpenDNS or Google Public DNS
    • Switch off the modem, wait a few seconds and turn on again.
    • Clear the cache and cookies on your browser. Exit your browser completely before trying to access the website again.

    Here is some of the chatter on Twitter:

     
     

  • Facebook Is Really Slow Today For A Lot Of People

    Are you having some trouble with Facebook today? You’re not alone. It’s been incredibly slow for us all morning, and it turns out that there are tons of people complaining about this.

    Here’s a sampling from Twitter:

    We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the issue, and will update accordingly if we receive a response.

  • Can’t Upload Avatars or Background Images on Twitter? They’re Working On It

    If you try to upload a new avatar or background image to your Twitter profile, you may prove unsuccessful. Don’t worry – you’re not alone. Twitter has updated their Status page to inform users that there may be a problem with this function and that they’re working on it:

    “Currently, Users are not be able to upload or update avatar or background images. Our engineers are currently working on this issue,” they say.

    UPDATE: In fact, if you try to access the “design” tab on you Twitter settings, it may take you back to your Twitter stream and display this message:

    Twitter is stressing out a bit right now, so this feature is temporarily disabled.

    Not mentioned: Twitter’s new header photo.

    Earlier this month, Twitter made a drastic change to the way profiles look by added a giant header photo to the top of profiles. The avatar now rests inside the header photo. Now, when users are customizing the perfect profile, they have to worry about three elements: the profile pic (avatar), header photo, and background image (web only).

    Some users pointed out that the new Twitter profile strongly resembled Facebook’s Timeline photo, with the profile pic imposed on the top. That comparison drew the ire of some, while other seemed to embrace the all new look.

    We’ll update this article when Twitter announces that they’ve got everything up and running properly.

  • iMessage Not Working For Many Users

    iMessage Not Working For Many Users

    According to reports from multiple outlets, users are currently experiencing some problems with Apple’s iMessage service.

    According to The Next Web, iMessages seems to be having problems on devices through multiple carriers. MacRumors reports that their forums are full of people complaining about an outage. The official Apple support forums current has a thread “iMessage not working.”

    “Is anyone else having issues with their iMessage? It keeps saying waiting activation and it has been for the past half hour. SMS are sending fine and all my other internet app ect are working as normal. Its so annoying!!! Help please,” says one poster. “Having the same problem! At least I know it’s not just me. Frustrating,” says another.

    A quick search of Twitter shows plenty of people upset about the service:

    Apple’s iCloud Support page currently says that all services are online

    I’ve contacted Apple for comment and will update this article accordingly.

  • GoDaddy: Service Restored For Most Customers

    Update: GoDaddy says service is completely restored, and that the outage was not the result of a hack. Full statement here.

    On Monday, GoDaddy experienced a major outage, and a a result, many sites went down. Many users and businesses had a lot of complaints, as you can imagine. The company has not confirmed the reason for the outage, but a member of Anonymous, going by Anonymous Own3r, has been taking credit for an attack.

    Follow the story here.

    It appears that GoDaddy is still working to repair the damage, but the company says service is back for most of its customers. GoDaddy tells WebProNews in an email:

    At around 10:25 am PT, GoDaddy.com and associated customer services experienced intermittent outages. Services began to be restored for the bulk of affected customers at 2:43 pm PT.

    At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised. We will provide an additional update within the next 24 hours. We want to thank our customers for their patience and support.

    In a series of updates on Twitter, GoDaddy said:

    According to reports, rumor has it that GoDaddy has transferred servers to competitor VeriSign, though this has not been confirmed by either company.

  • GoDaddy Could Be Down From One Hour To One Month, Anonymous Own3r Says

    Update: GoDaddy says service is completely restored, and that the outage was not the result of a hack. Full statement here.

    As previously reported, GoDaddy is experiencing some downtime, and a member of Anonymous is taking credit (though only on behalf of himself).

    More on this developing story here.

    When asked on Twitter how long he plans for this to go on, Anonymous Own3r indicated that it could last for one hour or for one month. Here’s the exchange:

     
     

    GoDaddy has tweeted that it is aware of the situation, and is working on it. It will be interesting to see how long it actually does go on. Meanwhile, people just want their sites to work so they can get on with business as usual.