uptime

Something has been rocking the boat over at Twitter, where stability issues on Monday afternoon caused the company to temporarily take down Twitter Lists, a popular and relatively new feature that lets members group Twitter accounts into categories.

"We began experiencing a very high rate of errors and we are working on the underlying problem," a post on the Twitter status blog read. It was later updated saying, "We are now recovering from this unexpected downtime. The Lists feature is temporarily unavailable as we diagnose the cause of the outage."

Many members had reported sightings of the "fail whale," … Read more

CheckMySite, a company that monitors uptime of Web sites, announced on Thursday that Twitter still has some serious performance issues.

CheckMySite continually monitored Twitter's uptime over the past 12 months and found that Twitter wasn't able to maintain an effective uptime rate during that period, though it did perform better in some months rather than others.

CheckMySite's report found that Twitter's best uptime between October 2008 through the end of October 2009, was in December 2008, when the site was up 99.97 percent of the time. During Twitter's worst month, August 2009, the its … Read more

Twitter's servers were on the fritz again on Tuesday, with members receiving server timeouts and third-party applications unable to access the microblogging service. This appears to have begun around 11:45 a.m. PDT.

Twitter posted an update to its status blog when the servers had been in flux for about 10 minutes: "Responding to site downtime. We're working to recover from a site outage and will update as we learn more."

The service was back up about a half hour later. At 12:17 p.m. PT, Twitter confirmed that it was an attack. "… Read more

Twitter was inaccessible for several hours on Thursday morning, followed by a period of slowness and sporadic time-outs (and more outright downtime). The company is blaming an "ongoing" denial-of-service attack but has not said anything further. Facebook has also confirmed that it was targeted by a DoS attack that rendered some of its features slow or non-functional.

Judging by the timeline of my TweetDeck client, it looks like the problems started right around 6 a.m. PDT.

"We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly," Twitter's staff posted at 6:43 a.… Read more

One of the myriad URL-shortening services out there, found at Tr.im, suffered an outage for some time Wednesday, rendering many links unable to redirect.

The service--which is owned by a start-up called the Nambu Network--believes hackers are to blame. "From this end it appeared we suffered a denial of service attack, and we took appropriate action to get the website back to full service," a Trim representative said to CNET News in an e-mail.

There's another, less likely possible culprit: Airline JetBlue hit one million Twitter followers on Wednesday, and announced a one day-only commemorative … Read more

Are My Sites Up?, the uptime monitoring service, now has an application for iPhone users that lets them keep an eye on all their domains when they're away from their computer. While the service offers free SMS and e-mail notifications in the event that your site goes MIA, there hasn't been an easy way to add new sites on the go, which this app does in spades.

You can add and edit new sites to keep an eye on, as well as delete them entirely. There is, however, no way to set what kind of notifications you want … Read more

The day after a 2.5-hour Gmail outage, Google has launched a promised Google Apps status dashboard to better communicate with customers whether their online applications are up and running.

When a needed service fails, people can be mollified--and can better plan what to do--if they hear what's going on and, what went wrong, and when the service will return. To this end, sites such as SalesForce.com and Amazon Web Services offer dashboards that show how well their services are functioning. Now Google has followed suit.

"The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency … Read more

One of my favorite new tools Are My Sites Up (previous coverage) has a new premium service for its heavier users. $75 gets you some niceties like no ads, secured RSS feeds, direct messages via Twitter, and faster checks on your sites. Users can also add an additional 10 sites to watch on top of the 50 you get with the free level of service.

Coming to the site soon is a mobile interface, statistics tracking, and an IM bot that will send you a message when there's a problem with one of your sites.

Users who are on … Read more

Are My Sites Up is a free service that monitors Web sites to see if everything is up and running. You simply plug in the URLs of whatever sites you want to keep an eye on (they don't even have to be yours), and it will send you an alert if it notices one is down.

It does this by visiting each page on your list--up to 50 per user--every 15 minutes. If it can't load the page, you get an e-mail. You can also plug in your mobile phone number to get an SMS alert.

I very … Read more