Jennifer LeClaire, newsfactor.com Jennifer Leclaire, newsfactor.com – 2 hrs 55 mins ago
Many years after the Y2K scare that left the world wondering if the Internet would crash as we entered the 21st century, two of the web's most popular sites have gone off-line this week alone. YouTube and Wikipedia both went dark on Thursday. Twitter went down last week.
YouTube is back up and running, but for more than an hour music fans, commercial lovers, content generators, and anyone else looking for videos on YouTube were rudely greeted with a "HTTP/1.1 Service Unavailable" error. Google told the Agence French Presse that YouTube was "temporarily unavailable" and "engineers are currently working to restore the site." But Google hasn't explained the outage.
"You get these waves on the web that you can't really plan for, and invariably they run into outages," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. "This should remind us that Internet technology is still fairly young, and yet it's being asked to perform in line with our electrical grid and utilities. In most cases it actually does surprisingly well, but it does mean we are going to see outages."
Wikipedia's Overheated Servers
This isn't the first time YouTube has experienced an outage. In fact, it's not the first time this month. Visitors to the popular video site saw the same message for a short time on March 2. Noteworthy, videos that are embedded continued to play during the downtime, according to reports via Twitter.
On the other hand, Wikipedia's outage is clearly understood. Wikipedia faced a severe outage Wednesday that took the site down for about two hours. The outage was blamed on overheating at the site's European data center.
"Due to an overheating problem in our European data center, many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place that changes our DNS entries," Wikipedia said in a Facebook post.
"However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikipedia sites to stop working globally," the post said. "This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone due to caching effects. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused."
Twitter's Fail Whales
Twitter was hit with a site outage last week. The micro-blogging service was unavailable for about 30 minutes, during which visitors were greeted with the "Fail Whale" illustration Twitter offers when the site is over capacity. Twitter has seen 41 minutes of downtime in March, according to Pingdom.
"A lot of these sites don't have a lot of money. So the end result is that they tend to be under-provisioned," Enderle said. "That would tend to lead to equipment being overutilized and stressed. Technicians aren't able to do preventative maintenance, and the end result would be failures."
In other news: Some Google users in China also reported outages Wednesday, in the wake of the Internet giant redirecting search traffic to its Hong Kong web site. Some Chinese searchers were getting error messages when trying to search on Google.com and Google.com.hk. A Google spokesperson said Google.com.hk is not currently being blocked altogether, but some sensitive terms are.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20100326/bs_nf/72407
