eBay, Facebook, Tumblr ALL go TITSUP in me-too MULTI-FAIL

In what proved to be a frustrating day for online time-wasters everywhere, eBay, Facebook, and Tumblr all experienced brief service outages on Wednesday. Rather than being the result of a coordinated retaliatory strike by Russian hackers, however, it appears that the downtime was all due to IT cockups within the companies' own …

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a couple of years ago, the tin foil hatters would have been shouting about the NSA and government snooping surrounding an incident like this and everyone else would be ignoring them.

Somehow, it doesn't seem that weird to be seriously wondering if something a bit fishy is going on.

[stucs201]

My computers has been warning me about the military reading my files since the days of MSDOS. someone called General Failure.

(the one with the floppy disk in the pocket)

[Anonymous Coward]

"it doesn't seem that weird to be seriously wondering if something a bit fishy is going on"

No argument there. In addition hope all the fanbois of the CloudFog had a nice day...

[Anonymous Coward]

Like all the ocean floor fibre cables that were being torn a few years back. Mostly due to fishing boat anchors and all happen within a few months of each other.

Turns out we now have heard via Mr Snowdon exactly why they were all having failures.

[MyffyW]

I smell something large and rodent-like.

[onefastskater]

I do, I do, I do believe in spooks! It's scary out there be careful.

[Anonymous Coward]

that makes me feel better

But if I do the same this weekend, I'm not sure my clients would be so calm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't say I noticed anything

Probably something to do with not using Farcebook or Ebay. I hadn't even heard about the third one until now. Kudos to their blog writers for their sense of humour though.

[VinceH]

Re: Can't say I noticed anything

I know of Tumblr, but only because the name appears here and there. My vague understanding was that it's some kind of social networking site, but not what the specific purpose was.

But, like you, I thought kudos to them for their sense of humour - so I decided to pay the site a visit to see what they actually are about.

The front page doesn't say a great deal. There's no page telling first time visitors about them or what they do, to encourage people to sign up - the nearest to that is a little bit of text at the bottom:

"201.8 million blogs, 90.5 billion posts, 30 seconds to join"

So I can only guess that it's some kind of blog aggregator - in which case, what's the point? What's wrong with using RSS?

[Mr_Pitiful]

I wondered why my wife started talking, I thought I'd done something wrong!

Thank god for Ebay & Facebook, they keep her out of my hair ;)

[Nigel Brown]

Can someone please explain to a non techy bod like me

What exactly is involved in server maintenance? Oil and filters and re-gap the plugs?

[Triggerfish]

Re: Can someone please explain to a non techy bod like me

they change the people peddling on the dynamos.

[Roj Blake]

Re: Can someone please explain to a non techy bod like me

In this case it's probably a catchall term used to obfuscate what really happened.

However, server maintenance could be patching software or it could be upgrading hardware. I would hope that they replace disks on an ongoing basis as they fail.

Data centre maintenance could involve all sorts of things including servicing of the plant (ie the power and cooling infrastructure).

At the more extreme end I've seen relocating an entire data centre described as maintenance

[Adrian 4]

It's not callled ..

Provocative Maintenance

for nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

More than just a few "sorry" messages. Site was totally off line according to most monitors and for quite some time.

http://downrightnow.com/facebook

and

http://downdetector.co.uk/problems/facebook

[Sir Barry]

Thank God I still had Myspace....

[Oliver 7]

I still don't exist

My account completely vanished some time between 7pm and 8pm last night and has yet to reappear. Looking at Twitter it would seem I'm not the only one.

[VinceH]

I had a call from my mother last night. "I think there's something wrong with my internet connection."

Guess what the real problem was. Go on. I dare you. Guess.

[MyffyW]

Lovely!

Like all those times in the 90s I had to explain to the Production Director that no, the LAN wasn't down just because he couldn't remember his email password.

[Anonymous Coward]

Irony

In attempting to access this site all of google's malware filters (something to do with technojobs adverts) warned me off accessing the register. So either its an issue or Andrew's been writing about Google again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit happens....

.... if all the world's most used services are forced to relocate their servers to langley on the same day.

[Skier Boris]

ParentPay site was down last night as well just to add to the fun. Lots of stressed parents trying to add money to kids school accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting timing as Vodafone had a complete (AFAICT) failure of ALL their leased lines and FTTC connections yesterday - but more importantly, it took our mobile data as well.

Seems they route all the leased lines through one point of failure and it lost power. Then when they switched it all back on again, only some of it started up. Some of us lucky ones were back online in 10 minutes - some of our customers didn't get back online until 11pm and I believe there were some not online until getting on for 4am !

Curious that I've found barely any mention of this online so far - perhaps "business users" losing internet aren't newsworthy enough to mention.

Anon as I don't want b***ocking for posting this from work.

[Anonymous Coward]

lost services at work in the morning too

santa clara county's (same city as eBay) IT had an outage as well around the same time

[Dave Bell]

If eBay goes down, I shall put in a bid for that "make your own guitar" kit.

Or maybe not. Keep knocking the rocks together...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not important

Amazing, ain't it, the way all these sort of outages (no matter how large they actually are or how many zillion passwords have been spirited away) always seem to effect " a limited number of accounts", "a small percentage" or "only impacting a portion of our users". Must be something in the water.

[Tom Jasper]

Mandated NSA update which bypassed beta testing?

[camelrider]

Fallout from "Update Tuesday?"