The Major Incidents of The Internet In 2007

The Great Skype Outage
Anyone using Skype will remember this one. Back in August, to the great frustration of its millions of users, Skype stopped working for almost two days. The culprit? Windows Update, apparently.

RackSpace truck incident
In November, a truck rammed into a power transformer and cut power to RackSpace’s Dallas data center. When their backup power kicked in, the chillers failed to start, and lots of customer servers had to be shut down. Among the affected were GigaOM, 37 Signals, Webmaster World and Laughing Squid.

Google Analytics takes a break
Easily the most popular website traffic monitoring service on the web, Google Analytics can’t have problems without a lot of people noticing. And they did…

365 Main data center power outage
This major San Francisco data center outage back in July may have affected more big-name websites and services than any other incident in 2007: Craigslist, Technorati, LiveJournal, TypePad, AdBrite, the 1Up gaming network, Second Life and Yelp were among the affected. Let’s just say that backup power won’t do you much good if your generators fail to start, which is what happened here.

Twitter Troubles
Twitter seems to be the service that can do no wrong in the eyes of its users. Not even a total of six days of downtime has stopped the service from becoming one of the big successes in 2007. A recent move to a new data center will hopefully help their performance in 2008.

Ubuntu.com crashed by eager downloaders
When the 7.04 release of the popular Linux distribution was released in April, the Ubuntu.com website drowned in traffic to the extent that the site stopped working, and later had to use a simplified landing page to handle the load.

Shaky Blogger service
Google’s mega-popular Blogger service has had several hiccups in 2007. That, and Google also managed to remove their own blog by accident.

NaviSite data center migration goes wrong
When more than 175,000 websites are left stranded for several days, you just know that someone will notice…

T-Mobile data center flooded
Their main data center in Seattle was flooded after a torrent of more than four inches of rain early in December. The T-Mobile website, their activation portals and several other services stopped working.

Black Friday too much for e-stores?
People love a good deal. So much, in fact, that several large e-commerce websites couldn’t handle the pressure on Black Friday, including Sears.com and Macys.com.

Media Temple grid grinding
This web host has had a tough year after introducing their much-hyped grid hosting service late in 2006. In December, Media Temple gave their grid-service customers two months of credited hosting fees and apologized for recent performance problems.

The Registerfly drama
Major customer dissatisfaction with failing domain name renewals that struck this company early in 2007 wasn’t exactly helped by the significant amounts of downtime clocked by the RegisterFly website.

Cisco trouble
They may be responsible for a large part of the internet backbone, but they are definitely not immune to website trouble.