Microsoft applies lessons from PlayStation Network downtime: don't hunt hackers

Microsoft has chosen to “nurture” the talents of a 14-year-old boy who attempted to hack into the company’s online gaming network, Xbox Live, rather than slap the kid with lawsuits. The lawsuit approach to hackers is presumed to have led to Sony’s online game network being crippled for nearly a month.

Microsoft has clearly learned from Sony’s lesson, because Xbox Live competes directly with Sony’s PlayStation Network — along with other online networks that sell … Continue Reading

Just how frustrated are PlayStation Network users over downtime?

Sony brought its online gaming network, the PlayStation Network (PSN), offline today — though this time it was just for some scheduled maintenance. But the downtime was a frustrating reminder for many PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable owners, as well as developers, over how the company handled the PSN’s downtime.

“Thanks for the heads up. It’s nice to be prepared for downtime,” one commenter wrote on the PlayStation Blog’s most recent post about the scheduled … Continue Reading

API downtime: Who's asleep at the wheel?

Many popular applications use the application programming interfaces (APIs) of other services, from your favorite Twitter client to Facebook apps. So downtime on the most popular APIs has a serious knock-on effect on other services and (up)time is money.

Performance monitoring company WatchMouse just published a study on the downtimes of the 50 most popular APIs including Google Maps, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Wikipedia.

WatchMouse tracked these APIs between February 16 and … Continue Reading

Reddit hires to boost news site's ad sales and uptime

Condé Nast-owned Reddit, a news aggregator site, announced today that it is finally hiring some new minions to keep the site up and running after a large number of complaints about the site constantly going down.

Reddit has doubled the size of its sales and systems administration teams — up from one person each to a whopping two. The site also hired two power users in the community to manage its customer service complaints. Aside … Continue Reading

Blogging startup Tumblr apologizes for growing pains

Tumblr, the fast-growing, well-funded startup which offers a simple blogging service, stumbled rather badly this weekend. Its site went down for what appears to be almost 24 hours and took its users’ blogs down with it.

The good thing is that Tumblr is back, and apparently without any loss of data — now I can go back to reading about hipster puppies! But in an atmosphere where you see a flood of complaints whenever there’s … Continue Reading

Foursquare ousts Twitter as Mayor of Downtime

Update: Oct. 6 – 12:30 am (EST) Aaaand Foursquare is back! “And we’re back. Web, API, and apps are up and running.”

Update: 10:45 pm (EST) Foursquare’s new “Status” blog is now down for what the site calls “maintenance”

Update: 10:28 pm (EST) Latest from Foursquare, “Running on pizza and Red Bull. Another long night :/”

Update: 9:00 pm (EST) Foursquare is currently experiencing downtime, again, and is claiming it is has to do … Continue Reading

Facebook explains 'worst outage' in four years

Facebook posted a note yesterday evening explaining the site’s downtime earlier that day — a 2.5 hour period that the company described as “the worst outage in over four years.”

The explanation may not be clear if you’re not involved in IT. It describes several database errors and the team’s attempt to fix them. The main message, as summarized for less technical users, was that the downtime didn’t just involve a single error, but rather … Continue Reading

You can't escape Facebook's downtime

Update: Facebook says (via Twitter) that all of the issues have been resolved.

Unless you’re the most diligent worker on the planet, you’ve probably seen that Facebook has had an outage for most of the afternoon. The site appears to be up right now, at least for me, but its availability has been erratic (it’s about 2pm Pacific as I write this).

When I emailed Facebook for an update, I got the following response: “We’re … Continue Reading

Wells Fargo outage said to affect 4 million customers

Update: Facebook says (via Twitter) that all of the issues have been resolved.

Unless you’re the most diligent worker on the planet, you’ve probably seen that Facebook has had an outage for most of the afternoon. The site appears to be up right now, at least for me, but its availability has been erratic (it’s about 2pm Pacific as I write this).

When I emailed Facebook for an update, I got the following response: “We’re … Continue Reading