outage

Gmail was unavailable Thursday morning for what Google said was a "small subset of users," the latest outage from a company that prides itself in running advanced computing systems.

On the Google Apps status dashboard, the company said at 7:29 a.m. PDT that it was aware of the problem. However, using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to access e-mail through software such as Outlook or Thunderbird still works, the company said.

Even a small subset can be a lot of people, though, as carping on Twitter indicates.

Gmail outages hit Google itself sometimes, providing extra incentive … Read more

No, it's not just you.

Facebook confirmed on Monday afternoon that there have been sitewide problems that saw log-in credentials turned down, status messages eaten up, and other various unpleasant occurrences over the course of the past few days. But the social network, which recently surpassed 300 million active users worldwide, hasn't yet disclosed the source of the problem.

"Some users are experiencing errors across a number of site features," a statement e-mailed to CNET News read. "This includes content occasionally disappearing, difficulty logging in or viewing profiles, and error messages when posting content. We … Read more

Twitter recently changed its default user avatar--you know, the one that pops up if you haven't uploaded a picture of your own--to a cute little bird icon. Unfortunately, then the service got a little bit overzealous and started chomping up existing users' photos, replacing them with the defaults. Oops!

"Many people in my timeline suddenly have default user icons," Twitter engineer Alex Payne posted to his Twitter account on Thursday. "This is probably not intentional. I have inquired with colleagues."

By the time the end of the day rolled around on Friday, there were still … Read more

Qwest Communications confirmed Thursday that the company experienced a long distance outage that lasted about two and a half hours.

The outage caused some of Qwest's customers to not be able to make and receive long distance phone calls. However, Qwest officials said that calls are now able to be completed.

The company was not able to provide details about what caused the outage nor was it able to provide details of how many customers were affected. But it's believed that the outage disrupted service in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and parts of North Carolina and Florida. … Read more

CNET News reporter Tom Krazit joins today's podcast to talk about what caused Tuesday's Gmail outage and what it means as we move more of our businesses and personal lives into the cloud. Also in today's podcast: Oracle's acquisition of Sun could be delayed by an antitrust inquiry by the European Commission, Sony unveils a new smartphone and Netbook in Berlin, and more.

Today's stories:

Gmail outage blamed on capacity miscalculation

European Commission may delay Sun-Oracle merger

HealthBase--medical search engines maturing

Sony unveils X Series Vaio, Xperia 2 smartphone at IFA

Nokia unveils N97 Mini, plus Netbook pricing… Read more

Google's nearly two-hour Gmail outage Tuesday was the result of a miscalculation regarding the capacity of its system, the company said late Tuesday.

Gmail was down from about 12:30 p.m. PDT Tuesday to about 2:30 p.m. PDT, affecting millions of Gmail customers who depend on the service for everything from fantasy football roster updates to business-critical information. The problem was caused by a classic cascade in which servers became overwhelmed with traffic in rapid succession.

According to Google, the problem began when it took several Gmail servers offline for maintenance, a routine procedure that normally … Read more

Most Gmail users were unable to get to their accounts on Tuesday as an outage struck the Google e-mail service. Google said service returned to normal at about 2:40 p.m. PDT for most users.

"We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail," Google said at 12:53 p.m. PDT on its Google Apps status dashboard after it discovered the problem.

However, hours later, the problems persisted for many, and the Twittersphere was abuzz with griping.

The problems appeared to affect … Read more

After two Twitter outages this week, the service is encountering another issue Wednesday afternoon as many users are reporting they can get to the microblogging site, but their feeds are not being updated.

Although users could add updates to the site, their tweets were not apparent to others on the site, according to several users contacted by CNET News, as well as our experience here in the newsroom.

The problems seem to have begun around 4 p.m. PDT. There is nothing to indicate that the site has suffered anything similar to the denial-of-service attack that knocked the site offline … Read more

Twitter's servers were on the fritz again on Tuesday, with members receiving server timeouts and third-party applications unable to access the microblogging service. This appears to have begun around 11:45 a.m. PDT.

Twitter posted an update to its status blog when the servers had been in flux for about 10 minutes: "Responding to site downtime. We're working to recover from a site outage and will update as we learn more."

The service was back up about a half hour later. At 12:17 p.m. PT, Twitter confirmed that it was an attack. "… Read more