outage

Modern life halted as Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram go down

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.

Forbes reported that such bastions of modern entertainment as Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram were eliminated from the firmament.

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

Twitter quietly grows up; handles its scandal

Amazon and Twitter both saw this week how much the world relies on their services.

First, Amazon suffered a patch of downtime following a power failure in a North Virginia data center -- leading to a number of high-profile sites falling with it -- and many jumped to Twitter to complain.

Ironically, it was Twitter's turn to stumble a few days later. But the microblogging site's recent downtime generated a lot more buzz than one might have expected. Twitter goes down all the time, right?

Wrong.

Its users have become accustomed to Twitter "just working." People … Read more

Twitter explains service meltdown

Twitter's service went down and up multiple times in a three-hour period this morning and it was all because of a bug, the company explains to users. The company said it was a "cascading bug," that spread into other parts of its system, causing the outage.

Twitter's VP of engineering Mazen Rawashdeh wrote in a blog post today that the bug isn't confined to a particular software element and instead "cascades" into other elements, affecting users worldwide. He said the company took "corrective actions," after it discovered the bug.

"Not … Read more

Twitter taken down by nasty 'cascaded' bug

It was a confusing day in the Twittersphere as users were met with a spotty site service outage this morning. The service went down and up multiple times in a two-hour period beginning around 9 a.m. PT.

Twitter said the outage's cause wasn't an attack, but a failure within Twitter's system. The company said it was a "cascading bug," which sounds like a bug caused a domino effect on the system.

Twitter's VP of engineering Mazen Rawashdeh wrote in a blog post today that the bug isn't confined to a particular software … Read more

Bug causes Twitter's lengthy outage

Last updated: 12:37 p.m. PT

Twitter users experienced a spotty site outage this morning with inconsistent site access. The service went down and up multiple times in a three-hour period beginning around 9 a.m. PT.

"Today's outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components," the company's communications folks tweeted at 12:17 p.m. PT. "We'll provide updated information soon."

Twitter said the company is working on it. At 11:37 a.m. the site was back up. As of 11:55 a.m., it … Read more

Amazon Web Services recovers from partial outage

Parts of Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage on Thursday that led to a spread of high-profile sites clocking off the Web for the evening.

Amazon was quick to update its cloud status -- its first update at 8:50 p.m. PT -- stating the problems were due to a power outage in a Virginia data center.

At 3:26 a.m. PT Friday, the company said that the problem had been resolved and that service was again operating normally. It also advised: "Customers with impaired volumes may still need to follow the instructions above to recover … Read more

Spotify suffers log-in issues; service now restored

Spotify suffered an issue that prevented users from logging in this morning, the company has confirmed both on its Web site and Twitter account.

"We can confirm that most users are unable to log in at this time," the company wrote on its Spotify Status Twitter page earlier today. "We are working on a fix. Watch this space."

In a subsequent update, Spotify said that it was working on the issues, and added that the problem also was affecting those who log in to its Web site. However, the company now says that the issue has … Read more

Facebook experiences apparent outage

Facebook was down for brief time this evening, and some users are still complaining of sluggishness on the site.

The outage appears to have begun around 4:26 p.m., according to flood of tweets by Facebook users complaining that they were unable to access the site.

Facebook is acting like its stock. It keeps going down

— HAL 9000 (@HAL9000_) June 1, 2012

Downforeveryoneorjustme.com was giving visitors intermittent "down" answers this evening when they checked on Facebook's status. Later queries at the site indicated Facebook was up, but several users around CNET reported their Facebook pages … Read more

Gmail users experience outage

Google's e-mail service, Gmail, is being reported as offline for many people this morning.

The extent and cause of the outage isn't known at the moment. It is not a complete outage, but Twitter is abuzz with reports from users unable to access the Web service.

Users seem to be reporting mostly outages in Gmail.com accounts. Users of Google business e-mail accounts (Google Apps) are also reporting issues. Google's Apps status dashboard reports, "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly."

Other services, such as Google … Read more