Internet Outages: They’re a Tradition!
By Harry McCracken | Sunday, April 24, 2011 at 11:49 pm
Like all blogs, Technologizer is a place where most stories scroll off the homepage and into the past in shor order. Some stories may merit revisiting, though–especially when they relate in one way or another to new developments. We’re going to start pointing towards some of these forgotten articles in a feature I’m calling Technologizer’s Vault.
As I followed the news about the humongous outages at Amazon and Sony’s PlayStation Network, I thought back to major outages of years past–which reminded me that I wrote a story called “A Brief History of Internet Outages” back in August of 2008, early in Technologizer’s storied history. It covered crippling glitches at AOL, Skype, Windows Update, and elsewhere–and if I were writing it all over again, the new Amazon and Sony downtimes might have headed the list. Here’s the story again.
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April 25th, 2011 at 12:03 am
The Sidekick outage has to be one of the top ones if you ask me. Not exactly an internet outage, but definitely a cloud failure of the worst kind. Of course I was in T-Mobile tech support at the time so maybe I'm inflating the scale of it…. who knows.
April 25th, 2011 at 4:28 am
I agree with lothinator that the Sidekick outage was one of the most impacting to a very broad group of people.
This Amazon outage isn’t too bad (all things considered.) It took two days (roughly) to get everything back, but since the Amazon products that were affected weren’t in extensive use, I think the number of customers that were affected is lower than it could’ve been.
If, for example, Amazon’s EC2 service went down, that would have had a drastic impact in lots of places.