outages

My pronouncement at the end of the short story about the brief Google Docs outage did not go over well. I said, "This is likely to be a major blow to the growth of cloud computing, as it reminds IT managers of the danger of relying on a unified product to serve all a company's users."

As commenters said, and I'm generously paraphrasing, I'm a kook. One little outage may send worrywarts like me running for the safety of Microsoft Word, but work is moving to the cloud, and it's high time, since overall it's a more reliable and more cost effective place to store documents.

Right on all counts. Let's posit that the cloud is a hundred times more reliable and less expensive than a corporate working infrastructure built on local computing power and local storage. Fine. Now let's imagine what failures look like on a fully old-fashioned (local model) system compared with a modern, fully cloud-based one.

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Update 3:25 p.m. PT: As of 3:10 p.m. Pacific Time, users from locations around the world are reporting the services are coming back online. Google's Apps Status Dashboard is still showing that Docs and Drawings are not working.

Update 3:35 p.m. PT: The status dashboard has been updated to reflect that all services are back online. Apparently, the word processing and drawing apps (Google Docs and Google Drawings) and the main document listing page (Docs List) were nonfunctional during the outage, but other files, in particular spreadsheets, were still available for people who … Read more

The Web's No. 1 video rental service is suffering an outage in some areas today, the company confirmed in a Twitter post.

"We're aware that some members are experiencing issues streaming movies and TV shows," the company wrote from its @Netflixhelps Twitter handle. "We're working to resolve the problem."

A company spokesman was not immediately available to comment. Netflix's streaming service has suffered a rash out of temporary outages this year. Streaming video to more than 23 million customers is no easy task, but the Netflix blackouts also illustrate just how important … Read more

Amazon Web Services' cloud-computing infrastructure experienced a brief network outage this evening that knocked offline popular sites such as Netflix, Quora, Reddit, and Foursquare.

The network connectivity issues struck Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) at Amazon's northern Virginia site, which handles AWS operations for the U.S. East Coast at 7:39 p.m. PDT and were resolved about 25 minutes later, according to the Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard.

AWS is a flagship example of one facet of cloud computing, a flexible collection of online computing services that can ramp up and down according to varying needs, … Read more

Yahoo Mail today was down for many users today, but according to the online company, its services are now operating normally.

Earlier today, CNET heard from a reader who claimed that "Yahoo Mail has been experiencing severe outage issues for the last 24-hours plus." After attempting to access Yahoo's Mail service, CNET received an error message saying that the "page you requested was not found." Other attempts yielded a "connection refused" message from the site. When trying to access the mail service through Yahoo's QuickView, the service said that it could not &… Read more

Netflix experienced an issue tonight that prevented some devices from connecting to the company's servers to stream movies.

A Netflix help line recording told subscribers that the movie-rental service was aware of the issue and was working to resolve it.

"We are currently experiencing issues streaming movies on Netflix-ready devices, however you might be able to stream on your PC or Mac," the recording said. "We are working to resolve the problem."

Netflix media representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding which devices were impacted, but a customer service representative said … Read more

Netflix's streaming service was down and unavailable for much of last night but has since been restored.

In a tweet posted around midnight Pacific time by the official Netflixhelps account, the company acknowledged that the streaming issues reported early had been fixed and offered an apology to its customers. This followed an earlier tweet from the account and a posting on the Netflix Facebook page at around 10 p.m. PT yesterday in which the company said it was working on the issue.

The outage had been brought to light a few hours earlier by several sources, notably a … Read more

Nice financial results notwithstanding, Google had some trouble late today with its App Engine service for online applications.

Overall availability of the cloud-computing foundation, which can run online applications written in Python or Java, dropped at least as low as 88.1 percent, according to the Google App Engine status dashboard.

The dashboard showed problems serving Java programs--more than half of attempts to request an app's Web page resources produced errors at one point. There also were delays in using a programming interface to manage tasks.

In Google's postmortem analysis, the company determined that there was an overall … Read more

In concert with the U.S. launch of the music service Spotify this morning, the online reputation service Klout offered a deal: Early invitations to the free tier of Spotify service for the most influential people on Klout.

Nice idea. Too nice, perhaps. Interest in the Spotify deal caused a rush to Klout, and the service collapsed. For a period this morning, Klout users couldn't log in at all.

I talked with Klout CEO Joe Fernandez about this. I was curious how the two companies could underforecast demand so badly.

Ferndandez said that Klout has done about 50 of … Read more