outages

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

Hotmail, Outlook, SkyDrive hit by service disruptions

A handful of Microsoft Web services have been inaccessible for hours this afternoon, including Hotmail and Outlook.

Frustrated users of the e-mail services and cloud storage service SkyDrive complain about the services' hours-long inaccessibility.

#hotmail its my own fault for not leaving you a long time ago, but man its miserable not being able to get your email

— Michael Fish (@MFishFinancial) March 13, 2013

Come on #hotmail I want to check my emails! You've been down for AGES!

— Catriona MacIntyre (@catmac6) March 13, 2013

Error, #Hotmail is down. Click the link "check latest status update" The update? &… Read more

iCloud nearly back to normal after early morning outage

Apple's iCloud had a major outage this morning, but things are slowly but surely returning to normal.

The outage was reported this morning on Apple's Status page, showing that 11 percent of users were affected. All of iCloud's services, including Mail support, Notes, and sign-in weren't working. Since then, the services have made a comeback and fewer users have been affected.

As of this writing, just Photo Stream, Documents in the Cloud, and Backup are not working. Apple says that it's affecting "less than 1 percent of users."

Apple's iCloud is no … Read more

Where were you when the lights went out?

Where was I when the lights went out?

I was at my post for the game in the CBS operations center inside the Superdome, sitting next to our head of NFL sales and our director of operations. As with every Super Bowl, we stayed in constant communication with the production truck to make sure all the commercials and promo spots played as scheduled. There are formats, rules, and procedures, and our job is to oversee them. We are there for quality control, and usually it all goes right.

Nothing prepared us for what we heard over the director's intercom: &… Read more

Twitter hit by overcapacity issues

Updated: Twitter has since reported that the issue was resolved.

The fail whale is alive and well at Twitter this morning.

"Some users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter," the company reported on its status page today. "Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue."

Downrightnow.com, which tracks the availability of Web sites, indicates that Twitter has been up and down for the past several hours. A similar site, Isitdownrightnow.com, shows that Twitter is currently up but notes that it was down earlier.

On my end, I've been able to access the … Read more

Facebook endures hours-long outage in the U.S.

Many Facebook users in the U.S. are apparently having a hard time getting onto the social network.

Twitter is abuzz with user comments that Facebook isn't working for them. And, the site downforeveryoneorjustme.com is also reporting the social network is down. According to The Next Web, users from Texas to New York have complained of intermittent access. Many users have not been affected by the outage, however.

While the site is down for many people, mobile notifications seem to be working, as is the mobile site m.facebook.com.

Facebook has had outages here and there over … Read more