App integration startup Zapier has launched a new API status dashboard, a free tool that can help developers and companies identify downtime for nearly 200 APIs.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company lets users streamline connections between about 200 different web apps and APIs. It was created in such a way that even non-coders can be build integrations between tools. Zapier recently grabbed a few headlines when it raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson after attracting attention from Y Combinator.

The company was already tracking all of these APIs and says it performs “hundreds of millions of API requests” each month, so it made sense to offer this new solution.

Zapier co-founder and CEO Wade Foster told VentureBeat that this new solution is better than dashboards such as Amazon Web Services, Basecamp, and 37Signals because this gives status information for many services in one place.

“The way you [normally] find out about API downtime is by making a call to the API and realizing it’s busted, but usually people don’t think it’s busted right away,” Foster said via email. “They assume something must be wrong with their code and start investigating.”

Image via Zapier

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Looks like last night’s Netflix outages didn’t happen just because too many of us were escaping our families in the warm, familiar glow of bad TV shows. It’s Amazon’s fault. Specifically, Amazon Web Services, and more specifically yet, EC2.

UPDATE, 12:15 p.m. Pacific: Services have been restored. You may go back to avoiding your family and watching bad TV shows.

EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud; it’s Amazon’s service for pay-as-you-go, (ostensibly) scalable cloud computing. A huge swath of big, cool apps use EC2, so saying “EC2 is down!” is like saying, “Depending on geographies, half the Internet you actually care about is down!”

The last time we saw EC2 take a big ol’ swandive was back in October. Yes, just two months ago, Amazon managed to flatline a bunch of services, like Flipboard, Airbnb, and Reddit.

If you take a look at the AWS health dashboard, you’ll see this morning that some services (elastic load balancing, Elastic Beanstalk) are still experiencing issues in North America.

For its part, Heroku (which platform-as-a-service also supports a huge swath of the Internet you care about) is also having issues, including HTTP errors and ssl:endpoint unavailability. In other words, if you’re using Heroku for https://, your site might be down. Or it might not serve pages and pictures correctly. Or it might be fine. Just depends.

There’s a lesson in here. For normal people who don’t work at Netflix or AWS or Heroku or Pinterest and who also celebrate Christmas, the lesson is get off your iPhone and go hang out with your family. They won’t be around forever.

The lesson for devs not employed at Heroku or AWS: Don’t put all your eggs in the exact same basket as everyone else on the Internet.

The lesson for AWS and Heroku employees is, much like ER doctors or plumbers, don’t count on a holiday.

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Tons of Netflix subscribers are apparently unable to escape the boredom of hanging out with their family members by streaming movies during Christmas Eve.

The disruption hasn’t been confirmed by Netflix on any of their proper channels, but several people have mentioned that they are unable to access the streaming video site via social media. Also, the site DownRightNow is reporting that Netflix is experiencing some kind of disruption, which is probably confined to the higher-trafficked regions of the country. (I’m currently in Nashville, Tenn., visiting family, and I’ve had no trouble drowning out my dad’s hilarious dad jokes with season one of The Super Hero Squad.)

The disruption has been going on for about four hours now (at the time this article published.) Hopefully, that will change later into the night when peak viewing times have passed.

The obvious downside to this situation is that tons of people are unable to watch movies tonight, which is extra unfortunate if you were all planning on watching a holiday-themed video. On the upside, you’re now free to spend quality time with your relatives.

Nobody likes downtime, but while your servers might be out of commission, your revenue could be dropping, too. In fact, businesses lost about $70 million in the past five years just by having intermittent downtime.

There’s a steep cost for letting servers go dark every once in awhile. Even if the blip is just that, a quick moment when you can’t access anything, you could be losing out on sales and losing data. According to the infographic created by MegaPath below, if you are a small to medium-sized business, and if your systems run at even 99.5 percent efficiency, you could be losing up to $12,500 an hour.

And in that time offline, one in every two small businesses experience some kind of data loss.

Downtime is most often caused by power station problems, followed by hardware failure, network failure, floods, and human error. These failures could be the cause of internal issues, or hacks.

The goal efficiency rate is 99.999 percent up-time. Where are your servers?

Created by MegaPath

Orange cones image via Shutterstock

Pinterest blocked traffic from Amazon and other websites on Black Friday last week, according to Pinfluencer, a Pinterest analytics service. Socialtimes reported today that extra holiday traffic — and suspected malicious activity — prompted Pinterest to refuse queries from the sites.

Update 9:38PM — Pinterest PR gave me the following statement:

During the holidays, we believe a third party was using Amazon Web Services to scrape our site so we temporarily blocked a specific traffic source, which is a common measure taken by web services. Some legitimate services may have been affected momentarily, but we do not believe that traffic to or from Amazon.com or other Amazon properties was impacted. 

Pinterest drives massive referral traffic that can drive impressive sales for online retailers. And though its growth has slowed in 2012, and the site is virtually ignored by small and medium-sized businesses, it is still on track to be the fourth-largest source of referral traffic on the web.

Amazon added Pinterest buttons to its website earlier this year (although it can be a massive where’s-Waldo exercise to find the social sharing buttons on Amazon’s busy pages). Presumably so many product pages were being viewed and shared by shoppers, Pinterest’s automated danger signals were activated.

The blockage lasted for 15.5 hours, from 11:30 PM on November 23th to 3PM on November 24th. Since Pinfluencer tracks pins, repins, likes, and comments, its services were affected as well.

I’ve contacted both Pinfluencer and Pinterest for more details, and will update this post as those companies respond.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

But it’s also costly.

And it’s relatively easy to have downtime. 40 percent of service interruptions are caused by power station failures. 25 percent are hardware failures, and 13 percent are software failures: mis-configuration or severe bugs.

Even when a service is up 99.5 percent of the time — which might sound pretty good to non-developers — it’s down almost 44 hours in a year. Three nines, or 99.9 percent uptime, is almost 9 hours of downtime, and four nines, 99.99 percent, is still almost an hour of downtime in a year.

Data and network services company MegaPath put together this infographic showing the causes and results of downtime:

photo credit: ex.libris via photopin cc

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Facebook went down for a while between last night and today, taking a few much-needed, well deserved moments of rest from an unrelenting Internet.

Put somewhat differently, the company’s servers and/or software caved at one of the worst possible moments, perhaps leading to yet another dip in the newly public company’s stock price, which sits at $27.84 as of this writing.

Widespread service disruptions have been popping up since yesterday evening, as this graph from DownRightNow shows:

What we do know is that the downtime wasn’t the result of an outside attack or DDoS event or Anonymous-led exploit, as you may have read elsewhere on the web.

Our sources close to the matter tell us this has more to do with one of the thousands of routine code updates Facebook pushes every single week. When you think about it that way, it’s more surprising that the world’s largest, most active social network doesn’t have more downtime than it does.

The outage is being called a service disruption that affected a large number of Facebook users for an hour or longer last night and for about the same amount of time today. For others, Facebook has been merely slow to load.

Sorry weekend gamers. Sony’s PlayStation Network will be down today starting at noon PT for scheduled maintenance and will last until approximately 2 a.m. PT on Monday, according to a Sony announcement.

“Unlike typical maintenance events, consumers who are already signed-in to PSN will be signed-out, and consumers will be unable to sign in for the duration of the maintenance window,” Sony wrote on the official PlayStation Blog. “During this time, users won’t be able to access the PlayStation Store, PlayStation Home, Account Management or play online. PSN enabled websites will not be able to service users, including this one.”

Sony had originally planned the downtime for last Thursday but postponed it to today for some reason. Frustratingly, Sony did not detail what exactly it was hoping to accomplish during the maintenance period.

In light of the recent PlayStation Vita launch, this downtime does not look good. I certainly would be upset if I wanted to spend the weekend playing matches on a new console and they took it down on a Sunday. Many users on the PlayStation Blog responded unfavorably to choosing daytime weekend hours instead of, say, overnight on a weekday. A few choice selections from the blog:

“That is an awful time period,” wrote user jayrockslife. “Why not start at midnight instead of noon? Less people are online overnight than during the evening.”

“Looks like the Killzone 3 double xp weekend just got a lot shorter,” wrote user LongbowAVRiL.

“You do realize that your customers are actual, you know…people, right?” wrote user Sponge-worthy. “No explanation as to what this maintenance will achieve, how it will benefit the community, nor why this MUST happen during the weekend.”

Let us know in the comments below if you’re agitated with Sony too.

Construction workers on motherboard: Amy Walters/Shutterstock

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform suffered a serious outage Tuesday evening and many customers are still without full access, according to the Azure Service Dashboard.

Azure is used by many companies to host and build web applications through Microsoft’s own data centers.

According to a circulated statement from Microsoft’s outside PR firm, Microsoft first noticed the issue Tuesday at 5:45 PM PST and did what it could to resolve the issues. “Windows Azure engineering teams developed, validated and deployed a fix that resolved the issue for the majority of our customers,” the statement reads. “Some customers in 3 sub regions – North Central US, South Central US and North Europe – remain affected. Engineering teams are actively working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”

As of this writing, the Azure Service Dashboard indicates that much of the services provided by Azure have been restored. But the biggest glaring problem appears to be the company’s SQL Azure Data Sync feature, which is down in every region of the world it serves. This feature allows developers to sync and backup important database and coding.

Vineet Jain, CEO of Egnyte, a cloud storage provider for businesses, said in an e-mailed statement that the downtime highlighted a flaw with traditional cloud infrastructure. Egnyte offers a hybrid cloud solution that helps eliminate downtime. Jain writes:

The outage that occurred today with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform can be crippling and cost millions if not billions of dollars, but more importantly highlights the down side of a pure cloud strategy in the enterprise. While we certainly don’t relish these moments, the downtime can be significantly mitigated if organizations were to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. By maintaining a behind the firewall presence and syncing that to the public cloud, companies are creating an insurance policy just for these situations. At the same time they can keep downtime to a minimum and insure their employees are as productive as possible in an emergency situation like this. Hybrid cloud is the smartest path to a productive workforce for today’s enterprise.

Did your Azure service go out? How many features stopped working?

Storm clouds photo: divingrocks/Flickr

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 games and demos like Valve’s Steam network for the PC and Mac computers. Sony lost around $171 million while the network was down for 24 days. The PlayStation Store, a critical service for Sony that lets it sell games and distribute them digitally, still remains offline.

Online hacktivist group Anonymous, which routinely takes up political causes like defending Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, brought Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) online gaming network to its knees with a distributed denial of service attack as part of “OpSony.” The group attacked Sony because the company tried to prosecute George Hotz, a 21-year-old hacker who modified his PlayStation 3 to install unauthorized software — a process called jailbreaking the device.

It was around that time that a group of hackers was able to crack into the PSN and steal sensitive information about more than 100 million PSN and Station.com users, Sony said in a statement. When the PlayStation Network crashed on April 21, Anonymous said it was not behind the attack. Instead, the hacktivist group said, “Sony is incompetent.” (We previously published a timeline for the Playstation Network outage and credit card information theft scandal.)

Microsoft General Manager Paul Rellis said the company is working with the teenager to develop his talents for legitimate purposes — though he wouldn’t specify what that means.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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“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 maintenance downtime.

It was a frustration that echoed across a number of media sites — VentureBeat included — and Sony’s own PlayStation blog. You can see a comparison of some of the blog posts about the PSN’s downtime — with the number of comments that appeared on the blog post and the general rating for each blog post. Commenters could rate each blog post on a scale of one to five, and any blog post rated well under the average rating for Sony’s typical blog posts is labeled in red.

The information above was compiled by VentureBeat from the PlayStation Blog posts. Just about every post about the PSN’s downtime blitzed past the average reply count for posts on Sony’s PlayStation Blog (which VentureBeat measured across the first 100 posts before the PSN outage began.) Posts about the initial response to the downtime wer rated poorly, and the ratings gradually went up as more information about the outage came to light. The posts that offered little information (such as when Sony said it didn’t know when the network would come back online) were rated the worst among the PlayStation Blog.

Sony finally brought its beleaguered online gaming network back online last week after hackers were able to break in and steal sensitive information about more than 100 million PSN and Station.com users. That ended a 24-day period where PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable owners were unable to download new content for their games and play their games online with other players. Sony laid indirect blame for the PSN’s downtime on hacktivist group Anonymous, which typically rallies a group of loosely connected hackers under moral or political banners to take down large companies. Anonymous has denied that it was involved in breaking into and bringing down the PSN.

The company said the PlayStation Store would remain offline and it would still likely be up before the month is over. That conflicts with several reports that suggested the PlayStation Store would be online today. It’s a bummer for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable developers because they aren’t able to release downloadable content and new games on the PlayStation Store — all while other online game stores like the Xbox Live Arcade and Steam have remained online. Christian Svensson, senior vice president of game development studio Capcom, said on the company’s public forums that the downtime was costing his game development company “hundreds of thousands of dollars” because it could not sell downloadable games. Capcom is responsible for franchises like Street Fighter.

Obviously this isn’t a perfect snapshot of the community’s reaction to the PSN’s downtime. That will require some kind of sweeping survey. But the numbers seem to suggest that the community — at least, the community closest to the company that regularly participated on the blog — wasn’t as frustrated with Sony’s response to the downtime as the reaction from the rest of the world suggested. That could be because the PSN is free to use, unlike Microsoft’s Xbox Live, which charges a monthly fee to play online games and download arcade games.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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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 March 17. The APIs were tested every five minutes by authenticating and calling a single operation on the API (rather than all of them). In general, if one operation on an API is available, they all will be.

Ten APIs, many of them from Google, had 100 percent uptime including Basecamp, eBay, Google Charts, Google Maps, Google Search and Quora. Availability of less than 99 percent is regarded as “poor” since this translates into around 1 business day of downtime per month. Imagine if Internet access was unavailable in your office one working day a month.

The worst performers, managing less than 99 percent availability, were Digg, Gowalla, Geonames, Eventful, and Posterous, with MySpace coming in last with an uptime of 94.32 percent. This means two days of downtime per month. Paypal and Salesforce also didn’t do well, struggling to keep above 99 percent availability.

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 from those four hires, Reddit indicated that it plans to hire additional staff to keep the site up and running due to overwhelming demand from its users.

With any luck, the new staff will help keep the site from getting a case of the Tumblrs. Condé Nast, the site’s owner, doesn’t typically throw the news aggregator a bone despite the site’s periodic downtime. To get around that, Reddit has initiated a subscription program called Reddit Gold that adds a few new features and sells sponsored links on the main page. Both of those sources of revenue allowed Reddit to pick up the new hires — and to hire additional staff in the future, according to the Reddit administrators.

It is a bit curious that Condé Nast won’t throw additional support behind the site — or at least that it waited until now to do so, if they have any part of the new hires. The site had more than 1 billion hits in January and now sees around 14 million unique users each month. Reddit’s Mike Schiraldi couldn’t get into specifics about Condé Nast’s involvement in the hires but said Reddit Gold memberships played a large part.

“All reddit gold revenue goes right back into the site, either in terms of more servers or more people,” he said. “Condé Nast does not seize it to buy Picassos for the executive washroom.”

Reddit has basically dominated the news aggregation space amongst the geeks of the Internet along with Y Combinator’s Hacker News after aggregator Digg redesigned its site and sparked a large exodus amongst its users. Digg now has 8.2 million unique visitors, down from nearly 16 million unique visitors in August, according to traffic research firm Quantcast.

Reddit has around 14 employees working from San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, who sold the service to Condé Nast and went on to work with travel site Hipmunk (a favorite of VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha).

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 any downtime on Facebook, Twitter, or, more relevantly, blog-hosting site WordPress.com, a day is an eternity. The VentureBeat team would be throwing chairs through windows if our hosting service ever went down for even half that long.

And while the length is unprecedented, today’s downtime wasn’t an isolated incident. Tumblr has been experiencing growing pains for a while now as it tries to keep up with rapid traffic growth. In a new blog post, the New York-based startup acknowledges the problem:

Yesterday afternoon, during planned maintenance that was not intended to interrupt service, an issue arose that took down a critical database cluster. This brought down our entire network while our engineers worked feverishly to restore these databases and bring your blogs back online.

While you might feel like you’ve gotten used to seeing errors on Tumblr recently, know that this is absolutely unacceptable to our team, and unacceptable for a platform determined to be the best place in the world for your creative expression.

Frankly, keeping up with growth has presented more work than our small team was prepared for — with traffic now climbing more than 500M pageviews each month. But we are determined and focused on bringing our infrastructure well ahead of capacity as quickly as possible. We’ve nearly quadrupled our engineering team this month alone, and continue to distribute and enhance our architecture to be more resilient to failures like today’s.

The outage comes as Tumblr is rumored to be closing a $25 to $30 million round led by Sequoia Capital. This could lead to some awkward conversations with investors, but hopefully the new money is what the site needs to keep things running smoothly.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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 with yesterday’s problems, according to the newly launched Foursquare Status blog.

Popular location-based mobile service Foursquare is reporting that its service was down for about 11 hours yesterday, according to a recent blog post.

While the post is a bit to technical for my tastes, the company is obviously taking this seriously and looking to not only explain exactly what happened, but better its communication with consumers when problems occur.

To keep it simple, Foursquare basically had an issue with storing check-ins to what they call shards, a technical term for a portion of a distributed database. One of the shards became overloaded. When Foursquare tried to add another to balance out the problem, the site crashed—for a long time. Looking back, the downtime appears to be the longest in the company’s history.

To better communicate, the company will launch a new status blog at status.foursquare.com as well as post hourly on the @4sqsupport Twitter account, retweeted by the main @foursquare Twitter account. A more informative “error” page will also be used from now on that will share status updates.

Foursqaure isn’t the only one experiencing downtime lately. Facebook recently had its worst downtime in 4 years when the service was unavailable for 2.5 hours. Also, Twitter had a bit of downtime, which happened to correspond with its announcement that COO Dick Costolo would be replacing Evan William as CEO, according to TechCrunch.

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 “a number of things going wrong at once.” Eventually, in order to fix the problems, Facebook had to shut the site down, fix the error, then slowly allow users to return.

Besides taking down the Facebook site itself, evidence of the downtime was visible elsewhere on the Web, as the outage broke the Facebook “Like” buttons that many websites (including VentureBeat) had incorporated.

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 currently experiencing some site issues causing Facebook to be slow or unavailable for some users. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.”

Unlike Twitter, which experienced frequent outages in its early days and again this summer during the World Cup, Facebook has appeared much more reliable. Today, however, you could see signs of its failure all over the Internet — not just on the Facebook site itself, but also on any site using Facebook’s “like” buttons. On VentureBeat, for example, we actually removed our Facebook buttons because they were slowing down the site too much. (In case you missed it, I’ve got a screenshot of VentureBeat’s error message below.) And just as Twitter users take to Facebook to complain when Twitter goes down, phrases like “DNS failure” (which was one of the error messages on Facebook) and “Facebook Isnt (sic) Working” quickly took over the trending topics board on Twitter.

Last year, when Google went down for a few hours, the outage caused a huge dip in traffic for many websites. As Facebook connects to more and more of the Web, its technical problems could have equally widespread effects.

A Wells Fargo customer service representative told our source over the phone that the outage affected half of what the employee said were the bank’s 8 million online customers.

Service has just now been restored, around 11 A.M. Pacific time.

[Have you got the inside story? Email editor@venturebeat.com with your tips.]