outage

Gmail down for some for a day

Updated 2:45 p.m. PST with Google comment and corrects that company said on Wednesday that it would resolve the problem on Thursday.

Google says it is restoring service for a "small number" of Gmail users who have been unable to access their e-mail for the past day.

Everyone affected by the outage should have service back up on Thursday, the company said in a posting Thursday afternoon on the Google Apps discussion group.

"We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the … Read more

Tapping Twitter to monitor broadband outages

A number of Telstra's major broadband rivals have said they have no immediate plans to follow the telecommunications company's lead and use the Twitter microblogging service to monitor service outages and contact customers about support plans, though a closer look shows Optus to be one of the only large carriers not using the tool.

Telstra launched the offering over the past several weeks, garnering a mixed response from Australian users of the service, but rivals Optus, iiNet and Internode said they weren't as keen to offer an official Twitter-based service.

iiNet did admit that it had already … Read more

Microsoft's Xbox Live hit with additional outage

An unplanned outage hit Microsoft's Xbox Live service starting Tuesday night, leaving online gamers unable to connect.

The outage started at 8:48 p.m. PDT Tuesday, according to Microsoft. It followed an earlier scheduled maintenance to both the Zune Marketplace and Xbox Live services that ran through the night Sunday and into Monday.

Microsoft said the outage was due to an unexpected issue following the maintenance work. Visitors to Microsoft's Xbox Live support page have been offered the following status update.

"Users will not be able to connect or log into Xbox Live," Microsoft said. &… Read more

Long Zune outage coming Monday

Microsoft warned Zune owners on Friday to prepare for an extended service outage starting Monday.

In an e-mail sent at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Microsoft warned that the outage could last for "up to 48 hours." The e-mail said the outage, which begins at 12:01 a.m. PDT on Monday, is for "scheduled maintenance."

A Microsoft representative would not offer more specifics or say why the outage was for such a long period of time. During the outage, the Zune Social, the Zune.Net forums as well as the Zune Marketplace online store will … Read more

Bank of America site goes down

The Web site for Bank of America was down on Monday for some customers, a spokeswoman for the bank said.

Tara Burke cited "temporary systems issues" and declined to say what the cause was or whether it was related to Bank of America's proposed purchase of Merrill Lynch or other recent turmoil on Wall Street.

"We've had sporadic interruption of online banking service. It doesn't impact customer information, just the ability to access it," she said. "We are continuing to correct the error. The site should return shortly."

The site had … Read more

AT&T fixes wireless-data issue

AT&T on Wednesday said that it has fixed a problem that caused many iPhone users in the Northeastern U.S. to complain that they couldn't access the mobile Web.

The company told newswire Reuters that the problem, which caused some users to not be able to surf the Web on their phones, was fixed just before noon on Wednesday. The problem did not affect phone calls, text messages or mobile e-mail from devices such as Research In Motion's BlackBerry.

A company spokesman told the news service that it was a "routing issue" that affected … Read more

Is it time for Netflix to invest in system upgrade?

Netflix has traced the causes of a lengthy system outage this month that prevented the online movie rental service from shipping for several days to a hardware glitch.

The good news for the company is that it received lots of help from vendors to determine that the cause of the outage, which hobbled the company's ability to ship DVDs from August 11 to August 15, was a "key faulty hardware component." Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said the company's "strongest aspiration is to safeguard this from ever happening again."

The bad news for the … Read more

Craigslist experiences listings outage

Updated at 11:43 a.m. PDT to report that the site appears to be operational again.

Internet bulletin board Craigslist experienced an outage Sunday morning of at least a couple hours that prevented users from accessing listings pages.

Instead of seeing housing or job listings, visitors to the site were greeted with a message that said, "Unable to process request, please try again." However, the entire site didn't appear to be affected, as basic site information pages are still accessible.

The site's system status page reported that it had recognized the outage around 9 a.… Read more

Amazon offers automatic credit for S3 outage

Customers affected by Sunday's outage of Amazon's Simple Storage Service, an online data storage plan, won't have to do anything to get credit for the hours-long glitch.

"We'll be announcing on the developer forum momentarily that we'll be waiving our standard SLA (service-level agreement) process and applying the appropriate service credit to all affected customers for the July billing period," the company said Monday evening in a statement about the S3 outage. "Customers will not need to send us an e-mail to request their credits, as these will be automatically applied. This … Read more