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.

“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.

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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.

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.]