Updated at 2:49 p.m. to include the information that Red Herring's Web site is back up.
Troubled online news site RedHerring.com was inaccessible Friday for more than an hour.
In the same week that the publication was booted from its offices in Belmont, Calif., Red Herring's Web site suffered a glitch Friday and didn't go back up until about 1:30 p.m., according to a source, who asked for anonymity.
Red Herring is on at least one tech pub's "Death Watch" and the site outage might have led some to believe the company had finally packed it in.
That's not the case. Alex Vieux, Red Herring's CEO, has told employees he is in negotiations with potential new landlords. He said Wednesday, after sheriff's deputies had evicted him and his staff, that he would announce the location of his new headquarters on Thursday, and added that Red Herring is not in danger of shutting down.
Vieux hasn't revealed the new location, but I'm told by former employees not to take him too literally.
Since Vieux took over Red Herring in 2003, the publication has been less notable for what's in its pages than for its internal struggles.
The publication has seen high employee turnover, sporadic publishing of the magazine, and a quirky corporate culture.
Vieux has stood out among technology publishers in Silicon Valley for his insistence on a dress code (male staffers must wear a tie), and his former policy on not including bylines on stories. Former employees have complained that the company was often late with paychecks.
According to a former Red Herring employee, many staff members--who have since moved on--referred to Vieux as "Boss Hogg."
A CNET reader provided this screen shot of the stock-price display glitch.
Some users of the customizable My Yahoo portal were unable to see prices for their lists of company stocks for a few days, but the Internet company said the problem has been fixed.
The problem afflicted only a small fraction of users, less than 0.5 percent, the company said, and was fixed Thursday. Those who were affected should consider upgrading to the newer My Yahoo version, said spokeswoman Stephanie Arnaldy.
Meanwhile, Google revamped its finance page Thursday, responding to requests to "make it easier to follow the latest news affecting the market as well as those (stories) that are relevant to your portfolio."
A lot of users griped about it though, as ZDnet blogger Garett Rogers observed. "Horrible, horrible new look. How ungoogly!" said one commenter in a long thread of complaints in the comments section below Google's blog. "The clean and crisp look of your old site was your best feature! Put the classic look back or at least give me an option to still have the classic look."
Many Gmail users had problems with the Google e-mail service's ability to communicate with e-mail software Wednesday.
Numerous people on a Gmail Help forum reported problems tapping into Gmail with IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) technology, which lets people with desktop e-mail software such as Thunderbird or Microsoft Entourage to do so.
Google acknowledged the problem but said it's fixed. "Gmail users had difficulty accessing some features in Gmail for about a half hour today. The issue is now resolved," the company said in a statement Wednesday.
"We take issues like this very seriously, and we encourage anyone who is having technical difficulty of any kind with Gmail to contact the Gmail Support team through the Gmail Help Center."
The glitch came at an inopportune time. Google is trying to encourage not just individuals but also companies to use its online services; Google Apps, of which Gmail is a component, features prominently in a Google alliance with Salesforce.com.
"A huge, if not number one selling point for moving one of our companies over to Google Apps was Google's robust network!" complained one user. "Now that we have migrated over, it seems we are abused children who do not deserve an explanation for why the service we pay for is taken offline. Perhaps it is time to find a new e-mail host."
I can't help but notice that after all these years, Gmail still technically is in beta testing, a strong signal that people should be cautious about relying on it.
(Via David Berlind.)
Glitches continue to trouble Citigroup, as the financial-services company said Monday that some credit card customers were unable to access their accounts via the Web.
Reuters reported that an undisclosed number of Citicard owners could not access the card's online account service. This is the second such malfunction of one of Citigroup's sites in a week. Citibank saw intermittent outages to its Web site last Tuesday.
Reuters was not able to determine when the outage began.
The company issued a statement to the news service: "This is a temporary interruption and we anticipate that the site will be back up in the next few hours."
Citigroup is the largest company in the world with $2.2 trillion in assets.
Citibank, the country's largest bank, saw intermittent outages to its Web site Tuesday that prevented an unknown number of customers from accessing their accounts.
"Earlier today we experienced an issue that has resulted in intermittent customer access to Citibank.com," the company said in a statement. "As we are addressing this issue, some users are experiencing slow response times. We hope to be operating normally shortly.
A customer service representative of the bank, a division of financial services powerhouse Citigroup, said the issue began this morning and that the glitch has prevented customers from paying bills or performing any banking chores.
A bank spokesman did not disclose what caused the malfunction.
Netflix has extended an apology, in the form of a discount, to customers in the wake of an 11-hour site outage.
On Monday, the Web's leading movie-rental service suffered its second extended outage in the past nine months. This time, the glitch led to customers receiving their DVDs a day late. For those who were inconvenienced, Netflix is crediting their account 5 percent.
"We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused," Netflix told customers via e-mail. "We will issue a (5 percent) credit to your account in the next few days."
Netflix has declined to say what caused the glitch, how many customers were affected, or what the total cost was to the company.
Update 1:33 p.m. PDT: Netflix has apparently fixed the site's recommendations and ratings.
Netflix customers saw only minor glitches a day after the movie rental service suffered an 11-hour Web site outage because of an undisclosed systems malfunction.
Customers were unable to access ratings and recommendations on Tuesday, according to Steve Swasey, a spokesman for the company. The company, however, appeared to have fixed the problems by the afternoon.
"This is part of the site that we haven't been able to get back online yet," Swasey said earlier in the day. "Otherwise the site is fully functioning. We're shipping and receiving."
That's in contrast to Monday, when the glitch hobbled Netflix's logistics and shipping systems as well as the Web site. The company was unable to fulfill all of the orders scheduled to go out.
On the blog Hackingnetflix.com, numerous people who posted to the board said they were informed by Netflix that shipments were held up a day but would resume on Tuesday.
Many of those who wrote described themselves as happy customers and said they weren't put out by the outage. But others couldn't understand why Netflix has been plagued by Web site trouble. In July, the movie rental company went down for 18 hours.
"They need a zero down-time system like any other decent company," said someone posting to Hackingnetflix.com who identified himself as Bagman. "It is absurd that their Web site shuts down for even a minute...Amazon and Google haven't been down 11 seconds, that I recall, let alone hours. Please get sorted, Netflix."
Update at 6:15 p.m. PDT to add areas that may likely see delays in delivery.
Update at 7:55 p.m. to reflect that the site has since come back online.
Netflix customers expecting a little red package soon may be disappointed.
The largest online video-rental service has suffered a technical glitch that has knocked out its Web site as well as its logistics and delivery systems, according to a Steve Swasey, a company spokesman.
The malfunction, the source of which the company won't reveal, began at about 7 a.m. PDT. The site came back online about 12 hours later, but the malfunction caused Netflix to miss the deadline to mail a large number of shipments scheduled to go out on Monday--affecting customers across the United States, according to Swasey. "We did send some shipments, but most of them will go out on Tuesday."
Swasey declined to specify what percentage of the company's more than 7.5 million customers would be affected.
The blackout was the second longest in company history. In July, Netflix suffered an outage that lasted longer than 18 hours. On that day, the company's shares fell 7 percent as the market punished Netflix for a drop in customers.
This time, the glitch came as Netflix's customer numbers are on the rise and its stock is soaring. Stock analysts upgraded Netflix on Monday, and the company closed trading at $38.18, up 5 percent. Over the past six months, the company's shares have doubled in value.
One of the differences between the two outages is that Netflix's logistics and shipping systems were not affected in July. With the more recent glitch, Netflix continued to ship DVDs but that changed sometime Monday afternoon.
(Credit:
Screenshot of Netflix HTML source featuring deleted sentence)
In a message posted to its site, Netflix told customers not to worry because the company's "distribution centers are still sending and receiving DVDs." A check of the site's HTML source showed that the company rendered that sentence invisible sometime later.
"Our engineers have been feverishly working on repairing the problem all morning," Swasey said. "It was an unanticipated, unplanned outage, and we apologize to our customers."
Site outages are typically not a big deal, and any company can suffer one. But a blackout that lasts for more than an hour is rare, and one spanning several hours is rarer still.
Netflix, which has 7 million subscribers, said that customers needn't worry about their stored movie picks. None of their information will be lost.
Yesterday, Microsoft's program manager for sound in Windows Vista (what a great title!), Steve Ball, posted a blog entry explaining why audio playback sometimes gets glitchy in Windows.
There's an air of post-facto justification about the posting--it basically reminds us that a PC is doing a lot more things simultaneously than, say, a $20 CD player--but toward the end of the post, he notes that it's common for certain older device drivers to lock out the CPU for 10 milliseconds to 50ms, causing an obvious problem.
I'd be curious to know what some of those devices are. Perhaps he'll give us hints in his follow-up, in which he promises to explain some of the work in Vista that is meant to address these audio glitches.
As with many blog postings, some of the most interesting information comes in the comments. One user claims that WinAmp automatically moves its priority to "High," so it "wins" any competition for certain computing resources; there's also the beginning of a debate over buffering, which would solve some glitches but might cause greater latency, a problem for communications applications.
After discovering two weeks ago that the latest version of Excel had a problem with math, the software maker said the spreadsheet is once again ready to resume its spot at the head of the class.
Late Tuesday, Microsoft posted patches to its Web site that fix the arcane math flaw in Excel 2007 and Excel Services 2007.
"Thank you for your patience," Microsoft's David Gainer said in a blog posting announcing the fix.. The bug caused the software to display improper results when calculating numbers around 65,535 and 65,536. The company said the fix will be offered soon through Microsoft Update so that users can get the patch automatically without having to go to Microsoft's site.
It will also be part of the first service pack for Office 2007, though Microsoft isn't saying when that will arrive.
