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 results—a 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
Brown’s Computing and Information Services department

(CIS)  resulted in students reading  reading emails

belonging to other students.