outages

It was a confusing day in the Twittersphere as users were met with a spotty site service outage this morning. The service went down and up multiple times in a two-hour period beginning around 9 a.m. PT.

Twitter said the outage's cause wasn't an attack, but a failure within Twitter's system. The company said it was a "cascading bug," which sounds like a bug caused a domino effect on the system.

Twitter's VP of engineering Mazen Rawashdeh wrote in a blog post today that the bug isn't confined to a particular software … Read more

Last updated: 12:37 p.m. PT

Twitter users experienced a spotty site outage this morning with inconsistent site access. The service went down and up multiple times in a three-hour period beginning around 9 a.m. PT.

"Today's outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components," the company's communications folks tweeted at 12:17 p.m. PT. "We'll provide updated information soon."

Twitter said the company is working on it. At 11:37 a.m. the site was back up. As of 11:55 a.m., it … Read more

Parts of Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage on Thursday that led to a spread of high-profile sites clocking off the Web for the evening.

Amazon was quick to update its cloud status -- its first update at 8:50 p.m. PT -- stating the problems were due to a power outage in a Virginia data center.

At 3:26 a.m. PT Friday, the company said that the problem had been resolved and that service was again operating normally. It also advised: "Customers with impaired volumes may still need to follow the instructions above to recover … Read more

Spotify suffered an issue that prevented users from logging in this morning, the company has confirmed both on its Web site and Twitter account.

"We can confirm that most users are unable to log in at this time," the company wrote on its Spotify Status Twitter page earlier today. "We are working on a fix. Watch this space."

In a subsequent update, Spotify said that it was working on the issues, and added that the problem also was affecting those who log in to its Web site. However, the company now says that the issue has … Read more

Facebook was down for brief time this evening, and some users are still complaining of sluggishness on the site.

The outage appears to have begun around 4:26 p.m., according to flood of tweets by Facebook users complaining that they were unable to access the site.

Facebook is acting like its stock. It keeps going down

Downforeveryoneorjustme.com was giving visitors intermittent "down" answers this evening when they checked on Facebook's status. Later queries at the site indicated Facebook was up, but several users around CNET reported their Facebook pages … Read more

Google's e-mail service, Gmail, is being reported as offline for many people this morning.

The extent and cause of the outage isn't known at the moment. It is not a complete outage, but Twitter is abuzz with reports from users unable to access the Web service.

Users seem to be reporting mostly outages in Gmail.com accounts. Users of Google business e-mail accounts (Google Apps) are also reporting issues. Google's Apps status dashboard reports, "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly."

Other services, such as Google … Read more

A Visa network update briefly prevented some customers in the United States from using their credit and debit cards to pay for purchases today.

A company representative told the Associated Press that the outage was caused by a recent system update, but that the system was now operating normally. The 40-minute outage began at 11:40 a.m. PT, an unidentified banking industry source told the AP.

A Visa customer told CNET that he tried to use his credit card to pay for a fill-up at a Boston-area gas station around 12:30 p.m. PT but couldn't complete … Read more

A nationwide outage has left Virgin Mobile customers in the U.S. without text or data services.

The company confirmed the disruption in a tweet this afternoon and said that engineers were working on the issue but did not give any indication what caused the outage or when it is expected to be resolved.

We're currently experiencing a national data & text messaging outage. Our engineers are working to resolve it. Thank you for your patience.

Virgin Mobile is an MVNO, or mobile virtual network operator that leases network capacity from parent … Read more

Verizon's 4G services continue to suffer growing pains with yet another outage being reported by users in several different states.

A few customers in Michigan, Arizona, and Virginia so far have posted messages about outages via the Verizon discussion forums, while Engadget has received reports of data coverage being down in Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

A fresh tweet from the company highlighted this latest issue.

"VZW is investigating customer issues in connecting to the 4GLTE data network. 3G data, voice and text services are operating reliably."

A Verizon spokesperson also confirmed the outage but said … Read more