Failure Friday: Red Herring, Magnolia, and Pageflakes go dark

As of Friday morning, technology news site Red Herring, widget start page service Pageflakes, and social bookmarking site Magnolia were all unavailable. But it appears all three will be back up and running.

Eventually.

As for Red Herring's outage, Silicon Valley Insider is reporting (via a Tweet from a former RH employee) that it's closing its doors. However, a source close to the company tell us that Red Herring simply has not paid its hosting bill, and that no employees have been informed otherwise.

In Pageflakes' case the site began experiencing problems early Thursday, which coincided with several other sites from parent company LiveUniverse going down. These sites, including LiveVideo, MeeVee, and Revver are all currently offline (which in Revver's case appears to happen a lot).

We contacted Live Universe founder and CEO Brad Greenspan about it, who says the downtime is simply a part of migration to a new data center in Los Angeles that has "lots of servers." Greenspan also said that the sites should be back up in the next few hours.

For Magnolia, the prognosis is a little more grim. Early Friday, the social-bookmarking site experienced data corruption and loss, which the company says will take "weeks" to sort out. In the meantime, the service has shuttered its Web front-end and closed external access to its APIs while its database is re-organized. It should be noted, however, that the outage does not affect development on the company's open-sourced project, "M2" which opens up the site for other people to add new features and fix bugs.

The one positive thing to come out of this is learning about the execution of downtime. Magnolia was the only one of these three sites (or more if you're counting Revver and LiveVideo) that put up a notice to its users to tell them what was going on. In many cases, this keeps panic at a low, and more importantly--does not make people think you're shutting down and taking their data or content with you. There is of course a third way to do it if you are actually running out of money: hibernate.

[big8news]

dom there go's my live video profile now livevideo 's is gone and ylive is gone too

[romeyinfc]

To be fair, Revver did post notice that they would undergoing maintenance on Thursday, but never gave any ETA or indication that it would be a while. Nonetheless that's pretty disparaging to fall of the grid the way these sites have.

[Joetwopointoh]

And cloud computing is the future? :)

Even if Pageflakes does return I think the resource is fatally wounded now. People have been leaving in droves over the last few months. In my opinion the management team there have made 10 fatal mistakes
( http://tinyurl.com/abgv7p ) which include ignoring their users, ignoring the competition and not taking part in the conversations surrounding the product.

[gmcbay]

google is messed up right now too, they are marking ALL websites as harmful and blocking access with their "Safe Browsing" feature when you try to get to the site via the google link. They are even blocking themselves (google for google, try to visit the google link that appears in the first result...)

Failure Friday indeed!

[Astinsan]

Try changing your dns servers. I used to have that problem.

[rapier1]

" Early Friday, the social-bookmarking site experienced data corruption and loss, which the company says will take "weeks" to sort out."

There really is no excuse for that. Database replication is boring and annoying but its a crucial part of business disaster recovery management (the good DRM one could say). That they didn't have any way to quickly roll out a duplicate database and get the site back up quickly is really just unforgivable.

[bmn_1213]

In the realm of "no excuse for that" is the ongoing outage on Revver and other Live Universe "properties." If you know there is going to be an extended outage, you don't just let requests time out, you transfer traffic to an outside site where you post updates about the outage, then re-route traffic once things are back in order. Maybe Brad Greenspan is out on a street corner with a cardboard sign trying to drum up enough spare change to pay hosting bills?

[Walterhouse5]

I think each of those companies could have benefited from the web uptime monitoring service offered by http://www.webserviceguard.com.

We monitor outside of your network and firewall giving you actual results from your customer's perspective, all with no software to install.