outages

Wikipedia struggled this morning as users took to Twitter and other social media sites to vent their frustration.

The world's largest online encyclopedia began to have problems at around 6:30 a.m. PT, with an error message on the site's front page stating that its "servers are currently experiencing a technical problem."

When users navigated to Wikipedia, pages partially loaded, stripping out much of the site's content styles and layout. The site loaded slowly for some, but many others reported that Wikipedia's homepage was inaccessible.

The site's error message advised the the … Read more

Twitter has an Olympic-size headache on its hands.

The microblogging site is making a push to be a bigger part of live events -- especially the London Games -- but had trouble keeping its feeds up and running on the eve of one of its biggest.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told The Wall Street Journal this week that the service is trying to "more closely tie the shared experience on Twitter to the actual event that is happening," essentially increasing its presence associated with the event. That goal is reflected in a partnership Twitter has formed with NBCUniversal … Read more

Twitter blamed an "infrastructural double-whammy" of two data center failures on the outage that left millions without the micro-blogging service for hours today.

Twitter's site went down between 8:20 a.m. and 9 a.m. PT and was out for about two hours before the company had the service back up and running.

Typically, if one data center goes down, there's another one in place for emergencies and redundancy. But the company said in a blog posting that the parallel systems went down at nearly the same time.

"I wish I could say that … Read more

Latest update: 11:46 a.m. PT

Twitter is officially back up and running, a spokesperson has told CNET.

Today's outage started at around 8:30 a.m. PT. The social network announced the outage on its Status page this morning, saying that "users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter." The company didn't say what the issue might be, but did say that its "engineers are currently working to resolve the issue."

After about an hour, some users were able to start logging into their Twitter accounts and post tweets. A Twitter spokesperson informed … Read more

Latest update: 8:57 a.m. PT

Google Talk went down hard this morning, but is getting back up and running.

"The problem with Google Talk should be resolved," Google wrote on its App Status dashboard at 8:25 a.m. PT. "We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

The Google Talk service, which works across Windows, OS X, and Linux, allows users to hold text, … Read more

Xbox Live users are unable to access the online-gaming service, Microsoft has confirmed.

The software company has taken to both its Twitter account and its Service Status page to inform users that Xbox Live is experiencing "difficulties." The Xbox Live Status page specifically says that users are currently unable to sign in to Xbox Live from their Xbox 360 or via Xbox.com.

"We are aware of the problem and are working to resolve the issue," Microsoft wrote on the Status page. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your … Read more

Amazon Web Services' prolonged down time over the weekend was caused by lightning, according to the company -- but was lengthened by software bugs in the cloud provider's infrastructure.

The bugs, disclosed by Amazon in an analysis of the failure, show how the size at which cloud providers operate can make them acutely vulnerable to failures in their software systems -- and acts as an object lesson of Google's statement that "at scale, everything breaks."

According to Amazon, its cloud in its U.S. East region (10 data centers split across four availability zones) was … Read more

T-Mobile experienced an hours-long disruption this evening that prevented many of its customers from accessing its data network.

The outage, which seemed to have begun around 6 p.m. PT, did not appear to affect the entire network and was resolved around 9:20 p.m. T-Mobile customers began complaining on Twitter a couple of hours ago about a lack of Internet access:

I had to check twitter...just to see what was up with T Mobile, since my phone Internet is down..,along with their customer service #

The wireless carrier confirmed the issue … Read more

Some clouds can simply eliminate others.

At 11.21pm ET last night, as the deep and the desperate began to settle down for a weekend of streaming movies and retro photography, thunder and lightning decided to bring a natural end to their plans.

The cause was reportedly an outage at Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud in North Virginia, brought on by a thunder and lightning show. Yes, Amazon's clouds are actually Earth-based.

Naturally, as panic ensued across so many smoke-filled living … Read more