The Year In Downtime

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."

First post?

[Monkeedude1212]

Unless the Server is down.

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[socz]

... for me to poop on!

At my place of business, the power cuts out when you plug in too many service into the battery back up system, and it blows a fuse!

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[Ethanol-fueled]

Are you one of those Californian hippies? Kombucha is some good shit, man. We've had such bad downtime lately from all the storming and flooding, epecially in San Diego.

Some people would be happy to postpone their field tests until the next year, but for me it's a missed opportunity to get the hell out of the office for fresh air. Plus, the street leading to my gym is also flooded. I'm having a sad.

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[account_deleted]

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[icebike]

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.

Preventative maintenance on server farms has pretty much been proven a losing proposition.

Nothing is usually done on a routine basis in medium to large server farms until some automated reporting software indicates a significant malfunction.

With today's fail over technology, even that is often easier to deal with AFTER a blade fails and its work load is instantly migrated to a hot spare.

There is just not that much preventative work you can do these days. Its all AFTER the fact replacement.

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[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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[afidel]

Of course you can do PM. You check the charge level of each cell in your battery packs, you check the temp in all the critical portions of the converter stages of the UPS's, you test the ATS by killing the utility power and run the generators under real production loads which also tests your AC units ability to quick cycle and that's just the infrastructure side.

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[rankgatente1979]

And that's just strictly hardware. OS, backup job review, and patching are all part of the preventive maintenance routine. job review [szm.com] . [szm.com]

Unimpressed

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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[MichaelSmith]

Ditto

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[Monkeedude1212]

What about your mistress?

Add Skype

[Luthair]

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.

Too bad...

[f.ardelian]

BBC is covering it.

... BBC doesn't work for me.

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[phantomcircuit]

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 [skype.com]

Dang Sewer Project

[memyselfandeye]

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

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[KUHurdler]

Man, someone might want to think about redundancy. (And I don't mean redundant power outages).

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[baegucb]

Thank you for your anecdote. (undoing mod points too, oh well)

Reality Check Network with Torrent / Tubes

[ian_from_brisbane]

Most noticeable one for me was when Reality Check Network went down knocking over hundreds of torrent and tube sites as well as thousands of other non-torrent and non-porn sites.

And on a related note, Skype is down...

[eagl]

Getting dizzy watching the little skype connecting arrows go round and round today...

In his defense...

[b0r0din]

the guy who shot his server found out it had been voting for Bristol Palin on Dancing with the Stars.