From 4:29 PM to 4:47 PM PDT on June 4 2013, a small number of instances in a single AZ in Us-East-1 experienced low levels of packet loss for network traffic using the instance’s Public IP-address.

Reference:

http://status.aws.amazon.com/

Mailchimp.com, one of the best known email marketing services has been hit by an apparent outage after the main website page was taken offline or appeared inaccessible.

This is by far the biggest interruption to the Mailchimp service in recent memory, however the company is not alone in facing tech issues. Services such as Netflix, and most recently, Bluehost, have all taken a hit from a variety of problems including DDoS attacks (Denial of Service), Datacenter problems and even, fuel outages in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

Whatever the reason for this outage, Mailchimp has yet to specify what is causing the issue. We will bring you more on this as it develops.

Resources:

http://www.filmindustrynetwork.biz/mailchimp-15-hour-outage-continues/22981

WhatsApp experienced an outage for around 210 minutes on February 22 from 11am to 2:30 pm PST. Users around the world reported that they were unable to send messages, and WhatsApp confirmed these problems at 12:16pm PST with a tweet stating “sorry we currently experiencing server issues. We hope to be back up and recovered shortly.”

WhatsApp started to work again for some users at 2:30pm PST after around 150 to 210 minutes of downtime. Some users reported that “last seen” stamps vanished from their conversations when WhatsApp first came back online, but now some say they’re appearing again.

At 2:48pm PST, WhatsApp confirmed it was back up with this tweet:

“WhatsApp service has been restored. We are so sorry for the downtime…”

Around the same time, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum apparently told the Wall Street Journalvia email that “we had a server outage, should be OK now.”

Resources:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/22/whatsapp-is-down-facebooks-new-acquisition-confirms/

Facebook, the most popular social media platform in the world, gave some of their users an unexpected surprise on February 7 2014, starting at around 13:46. Upon logging into their account, many were met with an error message from the website that said:

“Sorry something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.”

An update was posted on Facebook developers’ site at 13:53:

“Platform API errors and increased latency

We are currently experiencing high API response times and errors across multiple endpoints. While this issue is ongoing you may see slow responses to your API calls or errors with a HTTP status code of 500-503

This issue is being actively worked on and we expect it to be resolved shortly”

The issue was resolved at 14:40.

References:

http://americanlivewire.com/2014-02-07-facebook-down/

https://developers.facebook.com/live_status

Around 2:30 p.m. ET on January 30 2014, users began complaining that they weren’t able to access Amazon.com’s homepage.  Some were able to get to other parts of Amazon’s site, and the mobile app appeared to be unscathed. Amazon-owned properties like Zappos and IMDB were also unaffected.

Amazon released a short statement confirming that its “gateway page” was down for “some customers for approximately 49 minutes.”

According to data from Web performance monitoring firm Apica, Amazon’s homepage went down at 2:32 p.m. and was back by 3:21.

The outage was short, but it’s extremely rare for Amazon.com to crash. Amazon depends on heavy e-commerce traffic, especially around the holidays, so it has famously massive server capacity to handle traffic spikes. Even a few minutes of downtime can cost the company millions.

Its powerful “elastic” infrastructure, called EC2, is designed to minimize downtime as much as possible. Amazon also runs a sideline business, called Amazon Web Services, hosting other websites. Amazon Web Services remained unaffected by Thursday’s outage, according to Amazon’s status dashboard.

Resources:

http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/31/technology/amazon-down/

Yahoo! is urging users of its Mail service to change their passwords to something secure and unique to the web giant – after a security breach exposed account login details to theft.

The company said that it has reset the passwords on accounts connected to what it termed a “third-party database compromise” – that database contained records on some of Yahoo!‘s users. Yahoo! said the nabbed sensitive information is already being used by crooks’ automated attack programs to compromise accounts and their users.

In addition to resetting account information, which will force folks to think up a new password, Yahoo! said that it will be implementing two-factor authentication: users who have associated a mobile number with their accounts will be asked to enter in a code from an SMS message.

The web company said that it had yet to find any evidence that its own systems were compromised by attackers. The company did not name the third-party that had been hacked.

References:

http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/75083532312/important-security-update-for-yahoo-mail-users

A broad outage rocked Gmail and a raft of other Google Web applications Friday January 24 2014, leading many affected users to flood Twitter, other social media sites and discussion forums with complaints. Google acknowledged the Gmail problem at around 2:10 p.m. ET on its Apps Status site, and declared it solved at around 3:20 p.m.

The company later reported on the Apps Status at around 3 p.m. that more than 10 other services were also having problems, including Calendar, Talk, Drive, Docs, Sites, Groups, Voice and Google+ Hangouts.

The outages of most of those applications were declared fixed by 3:25 p.m., with the exception of Google+ Hangouts, which was cleared at around 3:50 p.m.

Later on Friday, Google published a blog post detailing the scope and causes of the outages. For 25 minutes, “most” users of these services were unable to access them, meaning that the outages affected hundreds of millions of people. The outages lasted about an hour for 10 percent of the affected users, according to Google.

References:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245710/Update_Gmail_other_Google_services_hit_by_outage_on_Friday

Many BlackBerry users on Vodacom’s network have been left disgruntled, after an outage on Friday January 14 left them without data services for about four hours, and are demanding some form of recompense for the inconvenience suffered.

The network failure between Vodafone and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) in Europe that caused the BlackBerry Internet Services (BIS) failure was caused by a router problem, according to Vodacom spokesperson Richard Boorman, and was resolved at around 2pm.

According to RIM, the problem reached Vodafone customers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The two telecoms entities worked together to resolve the problem, while social media platforms were flooded by angry BlackBerry users who were without instant messaging, e-mail and browsing services.

References:

http://www.hellkom.co.za/newsviewer/local/8752/Vodacom%20customers%20demand%20refund%20for%20BB%20outage

On Tuesday January 14 2014 Bid-Ninja reported an outage caused by their Amazon Cloud. The full announcement was posted on their blog:

“We sincerely apologize for the unexpected Bid-Ninja outage. We ourselves did not anticipate having any downtime at all. We are experiencing a minor issue with our Amazon Cloud hosting in our region.

We had to start a new “instance” on our Amazon servers and point our domains nameservers at it, which can take some hours to update/propagate worldwide.”

References:

http://bid-ninja.com/blog/bid-ninja/bid-ninja-is-experiencing-a-temporary-outagedowntime/

Yahoo-owned Tumblr experienced errors affecting the entire blogging network for more than three hours, the company revealed January 13 2014.

The company first alerted its members to the issue on Twitter at 12:02 p.m. Pacific. By 12:22 p.m., the problem still hadn’t been fixed, but Tumblr apologized for what it called “intermittent errors” and said that it hoped to be back in service soon. The errors, however, took several hours to fix and seemed to be contained by 3:29 p.m.

“There was a compatibility issue during an upgrade,” a Tumblr spokesperson said. “We are aware of the issue and in the process of correcting.”

Finally, the company posted an update on Twitter at 3:35 p.m. PT stating that the issues were resolved.

References:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57617151-93/tumblr-experienced-extended-outage/