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The Year In Downtime

Posted by samzenpus on from the down-but-not-out dept.

1sockchuck writes "Lightning, floods, car crashes, and coding snafus had starring roles in major Internet outages of 2010. Data Center Knowledge reviews the year's business downtime, including outages for banking and e-commerce sites and several incidents that knocked state government services offline. Meanwhile, Pingdom focuses on downtime for major social media sites and Wikileaks. Then there's the guy who got drunk and shot up a server."

6 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Lack of funding by DigiShaman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And then you have the cheap bastards and/or business without money. Time and materials are often needed to perform preventive maintenance. So, I'd say were seeing a lot more reactive vs proactive support as a result.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
    1. Re:Lack of funding by DigiShaman · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If you think firmware on modern devices is perfect, you're sorely mistaken. Just as with any other software, firmware on shipped servers can be buggy and lead to data loss. That can range from a nuisance to extended downtime. Things like BIOS, back-plane, RAID controllers, and HDDs may require updates to prevent data corruption or total loss. These are all things can be scheduled ahead of time in a controlled manor rather than be blindsided with issues during normal business operation.

      And that's just strictly hardware. OS, backup job review, and patching are all part of the preventive maintenance routine. If you wait till it's too late, you could be kicking yourself later and wishing you HAD spent the money over time rather than one lump sum in man hours with extended down time.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
  2. Unimpressed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    These sites should be embarrassed. My wife had 100% uptime in 2010. Did not go down once.

  3. Add Skype by Luthair · · Score: 4, Informative

    to the list, apparently today they're running into problems. I've had Skype crash while idle a first for me, intermittent connections and now BBC is covering it.

    1. Re:Add Skype by phantomcircuit · · Score: 2

      MEGA SUPER NODES

      What are we doing to help? Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal.

      http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/12/skype_downtime_today.html

  4. Dang Sewer Project by memyselfandeye · · Score: 2

    I would like to add our brand new little 'stimulus' rural sewer company that cut the main, and ONLY, fiber line to our little M&P ISP's backbone while digging a hole. No internet for 2,500 people and businesses on "Main Street" (we actually have one of those) for about a day. Keep in mind the fiber is actually above ground here - and runs right past my house, which is not fun to think about when I pay the bill for my 12/2.5 MB line, but that's neither here nor there.

    Then they cut it again, in the exact same spot a couple months later when they came back to fill the hole.