Website performance firm Pingdom has compiled its
ten most noteworthy web incidents of 2008.
They include website outages and service issues and large-scale
network interruptions.
They are:
Mediterranean submarine cable cuts
In January, a pair of cut submarine telecom cables in the
Mediterranean just north of Egypt caused severe internet outages
and disruptions in the Middle East, Pakistan and India. Further
cable cuts in the same region followed, sparking various conspiracy
theories.
The YouTube IP hijacking
YouTube was completely unavailable for roughly two hours because
an ISP, Pakistan Telecom, had mistakenly claimed their IP address
space (including the IP addresses used by YouTube's DNS servers).
This effectively took YouTube offline in a matter of minutes. This
proved that a single ISP can, under some circumstances,
inadvertently sabotage parts of the entire internet.
Explosion and fire at The Planet datacentre
Probably the most massive datacentre outage of the year happened
in June, when an explosion and electrical fire in one of The
Planet's datacentres in Houston affected thousands of sites (around
9,000 servers), some for several days. The fire department's
initial refusal to let The Planet activate its backup power
generators did not exactly help.
Google Apps and Gmail trouble
Google has had numerous difficulties with its Gmail and Apps
services this year, which set both the media and the blogosphere
abuzz with speculation about their reliability.
Amazon S3 outages
AWS (Amazon Web Services) has become somewhat of a poster boy
for cloud computing, so every time S3 (or EC2) has a problem, "The
Cloud" is called into question. Some of the outages were quite
lengthy for example, S3 had an outage that lasted eight hours in
July.
Political DDoS attack on Georgia
The growing tension between Russia and Georgia went online when
the websites of several official Georgian websites, including that
of the Georgian president, were subjected to a DDoS attack that
made them unavailable over an entire weekend. The real-life
shooting war that followed was a bit more serious though.
SiteMeter crashes sites
In August, an update to SiteMeter's script (websites can have it
included on their pages to get visitor statistics) started crashing
popular blogs such as Gawker, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Valleywag and
Problogger for Internet Explorer users. This incident revealed how
a third-party script can quite easily stop a whole site from
working, which is a vulnerability that every site owner should keep
in mind.
Apple's MobileMe launch problems
When Apple was migrating .Mac accounts to the new MobileMe,
things did not go as smoothly as they would have wished. Steve Jobs
has later admitted (in a leaked e-mail) that it was a mistake to
launch MobileMe, the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2.0 software and App
Store all on the same day, and that MobileMe should have been given
more time and testing.
Cogent peering disputes with Telia and Sprint
The ISP Cogent is a veteran of network peering disputes, and
this year saw them in disputes with both Telia and Sprint. In
March, a dispute with Telia was widely publicised, and October saw
the start of another dispute, this time with Sprint. These peering
disputes make it problematic and sometimes impossible for customers
of the different networks to reach sites located on the other
network. The disconnect with Sprint only lasted a few days, but the
dispute with Telia lasted for two weeks.
Friendster knocked out by datacentre issues
Friendster was once the largest social network in the world, and
while it may have lost its crown to Myspace and Facebook, it is
still one of the largest in the world. In November, technical
problems at the datacentre where Friendster hosts its servers
caused the site to be unavailable for more than 23 hours in just
three days, making it by far the largest incident for any social
network in 2008.