outage

Some Yahoo Mail users were unable to log in to their e-mail accounts on at least two separate occasions this week due to planned maintenance work, Yahoo says.

On Monday, Yahoo Mail was inaccessible to an unknown number of users as a result of an "unexpected issue" that arose during routine scheduled maintenance, the company says. The issue was resolved and by 9 a.m. Tuesday morning the outage was over.

Then, on Tuesday evening the mail service was unavailable for one hour and 40 minutes during a scheduled maintenance release coordinated with AT&T, according to … Read more

Citibank, the country's largest bank, saw intermittent outages to its Web site Tuesday that prevented an unknown number of customers from accessing their accounts.

"Earlier today we experienced an issue that has resulted in intermittent customer access to Citibank.com," the company said in a statement. "As we are addressing this issue, some users are experiencing slow response times. We hope to be operating normally shortly.

A customer service representative of the bank, a division of financial services powerhouse Citigroup, said the issue began this morning and that the glitch has prevented customers from paying bills … Read more

On February 15 this year, Amazon S3, the "cloud" storage service that's part of the Amazon Web Services suite of infrastructure applications, failed. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs who had been attracted to AWS based on its promised reliability and low cost had their confidence shaken. Several lost revenue when the service seized up.

Last week at the Under the Radar conference, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels sat down to an interview with Robert Scoble. The discussion of course came around to the S3 outage, and Vogels explained what happened. It was, he says, a "provisioning" and &… Read more

Netflix has extended an apology, in the form of a discount, to customers in the wake of an 11-hour site outage.

On Monday, the Web's leading movie-rental service suffered its second extended outage in the past nine months. This time, the glitch led to customers receiving their DVDs a day late. For those who were inconvenienced, Netflix is crediting their account 5 percent.

"We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused," Netflix told customers via e-mail. "We will issue a (5 percent) credit to your account in the next few days."

Netflix has declined … Read more

Update 1:33 p.m. PDT: Netflix has apparently fixed the site's recommendations and ratings.

Netflix customers saw only minor glitches a day after the movie rental service suffered an 11-hour Web site outage because of an undisclosed systems malfunction.

Customers were unable to access ratings and recommendations on Tuesday, according to Steve Swasey, a spokesman for the company. The company, however, appeared to have fixed the problems by the afternoon.

"This is part of the site that we haven't been able to get back online yet," Swasey said earlier in the day. "Otherwise the … Read more

Updated 1:55 p.m. PDT with DirecTV's response.

DirecTV apparently had big trouble delivering ESPN2's coverage Tuesday morning of the season opener between the Boston Red Sox and Oakland A's, who are playing the game in Tokyo.

The number of reader comments to a 6:29 a.m. blog post about the outage by Amalie Benjamin, who covers the Red Sox for The Boston Globe, soared past 120 within a couple hours after the transmission failure began. The fans, naturally, are calling for congressional hearings on the matter.

While the problem seemed to have been remedied … Read more

Update at 6:15 p.m. PDT to add areas that may likely see delays in delivery.

Update at 7:55 p.m. to reflect that the site has since come back online.

Netflix customers expecting a little red package soon may be disappointed.

The largest online video-rental service has suffered a technical glitch that has knocked out its Web site as well as its logistics and delivery systems, according to a Steve Swasey, a company spokesman.

The malfunction, the source of which the company won't reveal, began at about 7 a.m. PDT. The site came back online … Read more

Updated at 4:00 p.m. PDT: We have posted a completely new story here that details how Netflix will be forced to delay deliveries.

Internet movie rental company Netflix suffered a site outage beginning at 7 a.m. PDT Monday, and the company doesn't know when it will have the problem fixed, a Netflix spokesman said.

Customer service personnel told CNET News.com that they were told the site was undergoing routine maintenance when something went wrong, information they then passed on to customers. That is incorrect, according to Steve Swasey, the company's director of corporate communications. … Read more

People all over China are reporting that YouTube access has been blocked, possibly in connection with a Chinese government crackdown on Tibet, according to a colleague of mine at CNET Asia.

"I can't access the site here, either, and a quick ping through my network utility does show 100 percent packet loss, indicating that a block is likely in effect," Rick Martin, who reports from China, writes on his blog. As evidence, he includes this screenshot taken from his computer:

"There were some videos uploaded to YouTube already about the demonstrations, but this block will definitely … Read more