As Internet Traffic Grows, Glitches Galore

Starting this Sunday (September 20, 2009), Facebook users (both PC and Mobile) started experiencing site behave erratically with posts, comments disappearing or not showing immediately. One user learning about others facing same problems, commented and I thought something's wrong with my profile.. Another user said, I was getting lot of fb errors and was cursing my Tata Indicom data card.Even Facebook mobile users were facing similar problems. One user posted, Major problem in mobile FB. The moment you click on someone you are not friends with, it takes you to your home. This was not the case earlier. At last, Facebook confirmed the glitches and but did not reveal what caused it to happen. Some of the glitches, Facebook officially accepted include occasional disappearance of content, problem logging in or viewing profiles, and several error messages while posting content. Incidentally, Facebook achieved two milestone this week by achieving 300 million user base, apart from becoming cash flow positive. It appears to be probably case of Facebook not being geared to sudden spurt in number of users.

There was once a story in 1999 in a leading online technology portal aptly headlined Free Email Comes at a Price It went on to comment that Users of free Web-based email are starting to suspect they're getting what they paid for. Year 2009 will go down in the history as the year of glitches for those frequenting public email, social networking and microblogging sites. Gmail, Facebook and Twitter all have been subject to several glitches and outages in the last few months. All talks of 24x7x265 remained on paper as both Twitter and Facebook as well as Livejournal were subjected to severe D-DoS attack, which later on, was found to be targeted at denying access to a certain user in Georgia. Sometime back Blackberry users in the US were left stranded without any Internet connectivity with server problems.

A Google search of Internet Outage returned 2,980,000 resultsa good indicator of frequency of such occurrences. But all this goes to show the vulnerability of these sites against attacks. Not only D-DOS attacks and other attacks which these sites are regularly subjected to, these sites have also been full of glitches putting millions of users wondering if the problem was confined to their individual accounts.

For Gmail alone, there was a total of nine outage since July 2008 till September 2009. This is despite Gmail's official claim of keeping Gmail available for more than 99.99% percent available. Not only Gmail but all free email services did have one ore more outages or glitches since they came into existence and caught the imagination of the Internet users globally.
Not only these glitches, other there have been other factors as well. Submarine cables cuts have also become a regular phenomenon, resulting in severe impact on Internet traffic across the world. Amidst all this it is interesting to note and point out that India based-Rediffmail has not suffered any reported glitches since it came into existence.

No wonder, a 2008 study by Pingdom rates some of the popular social networking websites showing shocking results. In 2008, according to the study, Twitter alone had 84 hours of downtime (Uptime of 99.04%), Facebook, MySpace, Classmates.com, Imeemand Xanga had an uptime above 99.9 percent. The study mentioned downtime of some of leading sites--Google's Orkut (11.2 hours), Last.fm (12.5 hours), LiveJournal (16.1 hours), Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces (17 hours) and Hi5 (22.1 hours).

History of Glitches

January 28, 1997
AOL glitch resulted in users unable to send or receive e-mail for two hours

February 3, 1999
Hotmail servers blinked resulting in inaccessibility for its mail service

July 14, 2000
AOL glitches allows teens access blocked sites

April 5, 2002
A server problem prevented many users of Microsoft's Hotmail service from accessing their accounts for about three hours

June 18 2004
Several users were unable to log onto Yahoo's instant messaging program. The company released a statement describing the problem as an "isolated hardware-related issue".

May 23, 2006
Yahoo and Microsoft e-mail services suffer glitches keping some of their customers from accessing their e-mail or using certain features.

December 2006
Some users of Gmail had their email accounts wiped out, with messages and contact information being permanently deleted.

March 29, 2007
Yahoo Groups hit by massive duplicate e-mail bug

April 2007
Some beta testers of Microsoft's updated Windows Live Hotmail found new storage capacity erratic. The problem resulted in users seeing from their storage meter that had 4 GB of storage, up from 2 GB before , but the extra storage was not actually alloted to their accounts

August 18, 2007
A glitch that left millions of Skype users without phone service

February 2009
Gmail shut off for over 2 hours

March 2009
A small number of Gmail users were unable to access their emails

August 2009
Facebook controversially allows applications to access Inbox messages which was open to abuse

August 6, 2009
D-DOS attack on Twitter and Facebook, apart from Livejournal and other sites

September 2, 2009
Google confirmed that the majority of Gmail users worldwide were affected by its crash resulting in 100 minutes outage.

September 11, 2009
Glithes in Google Apps resulted in couple of students notified Browns Computing and Information Services department (CIS) resulted in students reading reading emails belonging to other students.