outages

Amid the shaky launch of the iPhone 3G, Apple's new MobileMe service--a juiced-up revamp of its .Mac offering--also took a blow. Apple has consequently opted to entitle eligible members to 30 days free as a we're-sorry gift.

.Mac accounts had been scheduled to "migrate" to MobileMe last Wednesday evening, but instead produced an outage in which neither service was available. New subscribers, meanwhile, had experienced issues signing up.

"The transition from .Mac to MobileMe was a lot rockier than we had hoped," a details page from Apple explained. The offer isn't for … Read more

A number of us at CNET News noticed that Facebook was having some outage issues on Monday afternoon, delivering "connection to the server was reset while the page was loading" messages to members of our editorial staff in New York, Boston, and San Francisco.

The off-and-on outages would make the social network available to some while inaccessible to others, and sometimes lasted for a few minutes before coming back. Facebook has not yet confirmed the presence of outages, but a company spokeswoman said via e-mail that she was looking into it. Meanwhile, connections appear to have been restored … Read more

One advantage of cloud computing is that it's an expert's job to keep the centralized computing infrastructure up and running. But even experts have problems, and that's what's going on Tuesday with Google's App Engine.

The service has been having outages Tuesday, according to a mailing list posting Tuesday. App Engine, launched in April and still in "preview release" mode, is a service that lets people create interactive Web applications written in the Python programming language.

"We've experienced several outages during the past 12 hours, the most recent of which started … Read more

Social network Facebook experienced what appears to have been a very brief server outage on Tuesday morning--15 minutes, tops--but looking at Twitter keyword search site Summize, you'd think it were cause for mass panic:

Amazon.com's Web site was offline again Monday, another significant interruption of services after a two-hour outage Friday.

As of 10:08 PDT on Friday, Amazon's main Web site showed the "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error message that also showed on Friday.

The e-commerce giant's Friday outage affected its Amazon.com site used by U.S. visitors. Monday's outage appeared to affect its U.K. site as well.

Update 10:26 a.m. PDT: Amazon.com is back, though the U.K. site still appears down to me. On Friday, the site was … Read more

Update 4:36 p.m. PDT with outside comment about possible causes of the Amazon.com outage.

A two-hour Amazon.com outage is over. Now on to the post-mortem: what triggered the problem?

Amazon declared itself clear of the problem this afternoon. "The Amazon retail site was down for approximately two hours earlier today beginning around 10:25 a.m. The site (is) back up," the company said in statement.

But as to the explanation, the company only hinted that its complicated computing infrastructure was, unsurprisingly, a culprit.

"Amazon's systems are very complex and on rare … Read more

OK, I'm having a little sport here. And no offense to "The Scobleizer," but Twitter's been down for much of Thursday and, truth be told, civilization, as we know it, continues.

I was debating whether to even post this update considering the service's flaky performance of late. It's reached the point where Twitter's consistently going down. Looking in from the outside, you have to assume that management has a sense of urgency about resolving these glitches, once and for all. Why it's taking seemingly forever to get on top of the problem … Read more

UPDATE (6:04 a.m. PT): SourceForge's sites are back up. UPDATE (1:27 p.m. PT): Comment from SourceForge was added.

On Wednesday morning, there appeared to be some sort of outage at SourceForge Inc., parent company of iconic geek news forum Slashdot and retailer ThinkGeek (among others). Neither SourceForge nor the sites it operates were accessible at 5:30 a.m. PT. According to SourceForge, it was an emergency maintenance window that "caused an unanticipated network outage."

As they might have said at Slashdot rival Fark, "Everybody panic!"

Performance monitoring firm Pingdom reported that Slashdot was down … Read more

The Twitter community may not be paying much heed to your posts this weekend, but it's not your fault.

The company behind the messaging service and Web 2.0 darling acknowledged late Saturday that some back-end changes had been failing to show tweets from a number of people. A post on the Twitter site from a person identified as "goldtoe, Official Rep," had this to say:

This is a result of some of the caching changes we made during last night's maintenance window. While those changes have made the service more stable over all, there have … Read more