outage

Help! My town is trapped in the 1980s!

Call me inverse Marty McFly, for today I'm writing from the faraway world of the 1980s.

Or at least that's the the era that comes to mind in my home base of Taos, N.M., since about 7:30 Wednesday evening, when one of CenturyLink's fiber-optic lines east of town was severed, knocking out virtually all cell phone service and much of the Internet access in town.… Read more

Facebook experiences apparent outage

Facebook is currently suffering an apparent disruption that is preventing many of its users from accessing the social network.

Downforeveryoneorjustme.com was giving visitors intermittent "down" answers this evening when they checked on Facebook's status.

While the mobile version of Facebook was available to smartphone and tablet users, people trying to visit the Web version Tuesday evening were greeted by the message that the page did not exist.

The outage appears to have begun around 6 p.m. PT, but it's unknown how many people might be affected.

Facebook users turned to Twitter to complain about … Read more

Survey: Creative Suite users loathe Adobe's subscriptions

Adobe Systems still has a lot of work to do convincing its customers it was a good idea to switch its Creative Suite software to its $50-per-month Creative Cloud subscription.

That's one of the messages from a poll of 1,642 readers conducted by CNET and analyst firm Jefferies. Of 740 people using the CS6 generation of Creative Suite products, 76 percent said they planned never to move to the Creative Cloud. And of the 612 respondents using CS5.5 or earlier, only 8 percent said they'd decided to move to the Creative Cloud.

"You should be … Read more

Adobe unplugs Creative Cloud sync tool during transition

Unexpected instabilities forced Adobe Systems to hasten a planned outage for its Creative Cloud Connection, a service that keeps files made on mobile devices or uploaded to the Web in sync with customers' PCs.

Adobe launched it a half year ago in a preview version, and had planned to take it offline this week to update the interfaces the software uses to communicate with Adobe's servers. However, the company said in a blog post on Friday, " some updates...have caused instability in the service. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you."

As a … Read more

Twitter goes down for some

Twitter experienced some hiccups early Tuesday.

The company said today there were service issues that were affecting some users. The message was posted to its Tumblr blog at about 7:30 a.m. PT. By 8:50, Twitter updated the post saying the issue was resolved.

The outage appeared to be affecting parts of the site. The main feed was working for some, while the connect and discover pages were down.

"Our engineers are currently working on this issue," the company earlier said in its post.

Update, 10:05 a.m. PT: The service appears to be back … Read more

Apple's iMessage, FaceTime hit with second outage this week

Apple's iMessage and FaceTime networks are once again experiencing outages.

The outage, which is the second this week, began just before 8 a.m. PT, and once again affects "some users," according to Apple's system status page.

Both services experienced a similar outage this past Tuesday that lasted more than five hours.

iMessage is Apple's proprietary messaging platform that works between iOS and OS X users. FaceTime is the company's live video chat service, also for those two platforms. In January, Apple said that iMessage users were sending more than 2 billion messages a … Read more

Twitter links fail for short time as t.co experiences outage

Twitter's t.co link shortener feature experienced a brief outage today, preventing users from accessing other sites when clicking on hyperlinks in tweets.

Instead of directing users to the link they chose, it sent them to a page with an error message that "something is technically wrong," and an image of a robot that had lost one of its parts. It's unclear what caused the problem, but the outage appears to have started at about 6:45 a.m. PT. The links were working again by 7:10 a.m. PT.

Twitter acknowledged the issue through a blog post, … Read more

LinkedIn Web site goes down intermittently

LinkedIn's Web site went down at least three times this morning due to an unknown issue.

The company confirmed the problem in a Tweet today. The site was up and down all morning, and is currently down again.

LinkedIn earlier posted an image telling users that it was "taking a moment to clean things up." The site returned shortly after its first bout of downtime, but certain features such as the in-box were unavailable. A second error message an hour later noted that there was a "Gateway Timing Error."

A LinkedIn representative told CNET that … Read more

Outlook, Hotmail are back up following lengthy outage

Outlook and Hotmail are up and running once again.

A problem had rendered both online e-mail services inaccessible to many users since yesterday. But Microsoft's status page now shows both of them are back in business.

The page gives no details as to what caused the outages or how they were resolved.

Hotmail, Outlook, and SkyDrive were all hit by downtime yesterday, starting at around 2:30 p.m. PT. Many users had taken to Twitter to report the outage and express their frustration over the inability to access their e-mail.

Microsoft's status page shows that the problem … Read more