In the last few months, I have talked on a couple of occasions on how an outage can affect a brand, be it personal or corporate [here and here].

Yesterday my servers experienced a 11-hour network outage due to a broken upstream BGP route.

It’s sometimes scary to see how worn the cobbler’s shoes are.

Today, there was a network outage that affected the servers from September 21 2008 15:30 GMT until September 22 2008 01:45 GMT.

The data from this period has been cut and hourly averages have been re-calculated.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

In my presentations and consultations on Web performance, I emphasize the importance of a correctly configured DNS system with the phrase: “If people can’t resolve your hostname, your site is dead in the water”.

Yesterday, it appears that the large anti-virus and security firm Sophos discovered this lesson the hard way.

Of course hindsight is perfect, so I won’t dwell for too long on this single incident. The lesson to be learned here is that DNS is complex and critical, yet is sometimes overlooked when considered the core issues of Web performance and end-user experience.

This complexity means that if an organization is not comfortable managing their own DNS, or want to broaden and deepen their DNS infrastructure, there are a large number of firms who will assist with this process. These firms whose entire business is based on managing large-scale DNS implementations for organizations.

DNS is critical. Never take it for granted.

It’s the first day back after the last long weekend of the summer. There is a a great amount of news flooding the intertubes, and what happens?

TechCrunch has a small issue.

It’s likely they’ll be back soon, but it’s still an interesting thing to see.

Update – 09:17 EDT (13:17 GMT)

TechCrunch is back up as of 08:49 EDT (12:49 GMT).

Between August 08 2008 18:00GMT and August 09 2008 03:00GMT, GrabPERF had a network-related outage at the hosting facility.

Many thanks to the Technorati team for working hard to resolve this complex issue, which eventually turned out to be a loose fiber-cable.

Data from the time period has been cut, so no one’s stats should be affected.

I apologize for the incovenience.

mon.itor.us, a service which also provides free Web performance measurement services, appears to be having a wee problem.

The most recent GrabPERF data on this site is available here. The issue may be corrected by the time you look at the data.

I don’t wish suffering like this on anyone. GrabPERF had it’s own 3-4 day outage a few months ago. It’s just sad to see when monitoring services go down.

Netcraft noted that Yahoo encountered a bit of a headache today. So I fired up my handy-dandy little performance system and had a look.

Although for an organization and infrastructure the size of Yahoo’s this may have been a big event, in my experience, this was a "stuff happens on the Internet" sort of thing.

Move along people; there’s nothing to see. It is not the apocalyptic event that Netcraft is making it out to be. Google burps and barfs all the time, and everyone grumbles. But there is no need to run in circles and scream and shout.

Yeesh!

Tags: GrabPERF, Netcraft, Yahoo, outage, performance issues, panic, crisis

Our colocation facility will be undergoing a power outage tonight/tomorrow morning. I apologize for this, but I’m not the only one it’s affecting, and no one is happy about it.

UPDATE: Power Outage has been re-scheduled. I will post another notice/banner when this date has been passed on to me.

Citizens Bank Outage

Originally uploaded by spierzchala.

Some days, your bank needs to get smacked around.

This is one of those times.

What is going on?

Judging by the flood of mail coming into my account for the last 15 minutes, there was an outage with the GMAIL SMTP servers sometime overnight or early this morning.

Anyone know what happened?

Technorati Tags: GMAIL, SMTP, GMAIL+Outage