outages

How and why Gmail and Chrome crashed yesterday

Google's email service crumbled yesterday for about 40 minutes, leaving millions of enterprise and consumer users without access to their cloud-stored email. 

Gmail didn't fall down due to a denial-of-service attack as was reported initially yesterday (which was quickly amended), despite no initial evidence to suggest that it was. The search giant said on its dashboard status pages:

Although our engineering team is still fully engaged on investigation, we are confident we have established the root cause of the event and corrected it.

Then millions of Google Chrome browsers crashed at around the same time. … Read more

Facebook suffers major outage, knocked offline

Facebook experienced a short but significant outage during the early evening, which knocked many users -- if not the entire network -- off the social network for about 20 to 25 minutes.

It is unclear at this stage what caused the outage, but Facebook's main site and mobile site failed to load. The Facebook API, which allows developers to install features such as the "Like" button on external Web sites, also failed to work, suggesting a meltdown of the entire network.

It appears that Facebook suffered DNS-related issues, resulting in the Web site not loading for many. … Read more

Google reactivates Speak2Tweet for Syrian Internet cutoff

Google and Twitter have restarted their Speak2Tweet service to let people disseminate voice messages over Twitter as a way to sidestep Syria's Internet blackout.

The Speak2Tweet service got its start during Egypt's Internet blackout in February 2011 but has been largely dormant since then. Late yesterday, Google announced on Google+ that it's brought the service back online:

In the last day, Internet access has been completely cut off in Syria. Unfortunately we are hearing reports that mobile phones and landlines aren't working properly either. But those who might be lucky enough to have a voice connection … Read more

Apple's iMessage service experiencing another disruption

Updated at 5 p.m. PT with service restored.

Apple's iMessage service has again been experiencing issues, the third major disruption in the past two months.

The proprietary text messaging platform used between iOS devices, as well as Macs, on Sunday was not allowing some users to send or receive messages from other users.

Apple's support status update from 1:34 p.m. PT said that "some users are unable to use iMessage" and promised a quick solution but did not go into further detail about the scale of the issue. The same status page also … Read more

How Verizon kept wireless service going after Sandy hit

With Hurricane Sandy due to hit the East Coast in a couple of days, Verizon Wireless executive Mike Haberman tested his house's back-up generator and ended up finding a faulty circuit that he quickly fixed. So when the outage hit his house in Morristown, N.J., he was able to get enough power to his laptop and phone to work from home last week.

That's a good thing, because Haberman was one of the key people coordinating the carrier's efforts to keep service going at a time when massive power outages wreaked havoc on the East Coast. … Read more

See Hurricane Sandy's impact on the Internet

When Superstorm Sandy struck the northeastern U.S. coast earlier this week, it brought a swath of destruction that harmed people, places, and even Internet connectivity.

Check out a fascinating video by research firm Renesys that shows Sandy's impact on New England Internet routing networks during the hurricane's landfall on October 29. The clip reveals the tremendous damage inflicted upon servers that direct Internet traffic in the area, with the greatest losses seen along the heavily flooded New York and New Jersey coastlines.… Read more

Amazon cloud outage impacts Reddit, Airbnb, Flipboard

Amazon's cloud service is experiencing an outage in the East Coast region, taking down popular sites like Reddit and Airbnb.

The outage has lasted for several hours, limiting access to popular Web sites and causing problems for small businesses and other Amazon cloud users. Along with Reddit and Airbnb, Heroku, FastCompany, Flipboard and others have been impacted.

Amazon isn't saying what happened, but a spokesperson said the problem isn't due to an attack, as some have speculated. A member of hacker group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the outage via a tweet, but the Amazon spokesperson said that'… Read more

Twitter experiencing service disruption

Some Twitter users are unable to access the network this evening, getting instead a greeting from its fail whale.

Some visitors to the site reported getting a message that the site was "over capacity," an issue Twitter confirmed this evening.

"Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue," the company said in a status update this evening.

A quick survey of Downforeveryoneorjustme and Downrightnow found that Twitter was being reported as "up" and experiencing "possible service trouble," respectively.

Facebook runs tests, knocks service off across Europe

Facebook experienced outages across parts of Europe today, affecting a small but undisclosed number of users, according to the company. The outage lasted less than an hour.

A company spokesman said the problems occurred when Facebook was running traffic optimization tests to determine which data centers to route certain users to. He said the problems were not caused by a hacker, despite claims from a Twitter user with the handle @AnonymousOwn3r

The outages occurred midday Pacific Standard Time, and Facebook says it is now up and running properly.

Here's Facebook's statement:

Earlier today we made a change to … Read more