outages

Netflix, the Web's top video rental service but one with a history of suffering outages, saw another multihour blackout last night.

The site seems to have gone down for about three or four hours last night, according to reports from those posting to Twitter. Netflix is traditionally tight-lipped about the causes of its malfunctions and this time is no exception.

"Good morning," wrote Steve Swasey, Netflix's spokesman. "It was a technical issue that we fixed."

The good news is that Netflix wasn't taken out by marauding hackers. Sony, Sega, and a number of … Read more

UPDATE: 6:25 p.m. -- It appears GoDaddy.com is back to normal after being down for more than three hours. The company says on its Twitter feed that technical issues, rather than hackers, were to blame.

It appears the domain and hosting super giant GoDaddy.com--perhaps best known for its trademark racy Super Bowl commercials and spokesperson, Nascar driver Danica Patrick--is having server troubles today.

Users have reported on Twitter and elsewhere their troubles accessing GoDaddy.com, which many customers use as a primary access point for hosting and domain accounts. Tweets about troubles accessing the site first … Read more

Skype is down for the second time in a matter of a couple of weeks, the VoIP service provider confirmed on its Twitter account this morning, saying it is working to address the issue.

"A small number of you may have problems signing in to Skype," the company wrote on its Twitter page today. "We're investigating the cause, and hope to have more details to share soon."

Skype users on Twitter aren't so sure it's just a "small number" who've been affected. One user wrote that he and "all … Read more

Skype was down for some users this morning, but the VoIP provider fix seems to have quickly set things straight.

Around 5:00 a.m. PT this morning, Skype posted to its Twitter account that "some" of its users were having trouble signing in to the service and placing calls. The company didn't say what was causing the trouble. An hour later, Skype updated its Twitter account to inform users that it had discovered the issue and would roll out a solution as quickly as possible.

That fix, which the company posted to its blog shortly thereafter, … Read more

Sony may have more work to do to jumpstart service to its PlayStation Network.

The entertainment and electronics giant announced yesterday that its entire portfolio of online games, game forums, and Web sites would go back online today. After service resumed, however, users started complaining on Twitter that it wasn't active long before it was unavailable again.

"Playstation Network was back up for about 10 minutes before going down again for maintenance," Tom Cranfield tweeted. "Nice work Sony!"

"Playstation Network is Back down looks like the servers have crashed," Lee Fraser of Manchester, … Read more

Are you a disgruntled PlayStation Network gamer? At least you're not alone--there are more than 100 million PSN users who've had their data nicked by shadowy digital thieves. Sony's (probably) working hard to get the service back online before everyone throws their PS3s in a canal, but with the only date we have to go on still nearly three weeks away, we thought we'd rattle through a few suggestions of what to do in the meantime.

1. Go outside Just kidding. We hate the outdoors as much as you. Seriously, it's full of bugs and pollen. Besides, everyone knows you can get a decent tan simply by turning your monitor up really bright.

Read more of "With PlayStation Network still down, what else is there to do?" at Crave UK. … Read more

The Twitter fail whale is making a Friday the 13th appearance to some users today as the microblogging site is reporting having problems.

"We are currently experiencing site stability issues," the company said on its Twitter status blog at about 10:15 a.m. PT. "There may be intermittent issues loading twitter.com and Twitter clients. We're working to fix it as soon as possible."

Meanwhile, Google was able to get Blogger back online this morning after a more than 20-hour outage.

Google got Blogger back online late this morning following a maintenance-related glitch that kept blogs dark for more than 20 hours.

"We're nearly back to normal -- you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored," Eddie Kessler, tech lead/manager at Blogger, wrote in a post on the Blogger Buzz site around 10:30 a.m. PT.

The post continues:

Here's what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger's behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may … Read more

Google's Blogger service has been offline or unreliable for much of the day, with Blogger-hosted blogs changed to read-only mode, and posts and comments made after 7:37 a.m. PDT on May 11, 2011, removed.

In a post on the Blogger help forum, the product team said that it had rolled back a scheduled maintenance release from last night and that its "engineers are working hard to return Blogger to normal and restore your posts and comments."

Google's reply for a request for comment was, "The team is working on this." The company … Read more