outages

A British Web site that warns consumers about online financial scams was taken down by a distributed denial-of-service attack on Monday.

Bobbear was being overwhelmed by a "huge" botnet with "over half a million recorded zombie hits from midnight to 8 a.m. today (GMT)," Bob Harrison, administrator of Bobbear, told security firm Sophos.

The site remained down as late as midday Pacific time.

Bobbear has been targeted before. In October 2007, hackers attempted to damage the company's reputation by sending e-mails that solicited donations to the company via an online payment service.

"An … Read more

A central part of Amazon's online computing foundation is growing up.

The Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that gives customers on-demand access to Linux servers, is now out of beta testing, said Jeff Barr, evangelist for the collection of online options collectively called Amazon Web Services.

"Amazon EC2 is now in full production," Barr said in a blog post Thursday. And as promised, EC2 now offers Windows in a beta test, joining Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition.

Along with those moves, EC2 now comes with a service level agreement, a formal commitment that the … Read more

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

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

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

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

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 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

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