We have gathered 13 of the most notable internet-related outages and incidents of 2007. Why 13? Though you usually can’t blame downtime on bad luck, we thought it was an appropriate number for a collection like this.

Now on to the list!

The Great Skype Outage

Anyone using Skype will remember this one. Back in August, to the great frustration of its millions of users, Skype stopped working for almost two days. The culprit? Windows Update, apparently.

RackSpace truck incident

In November, a truck rammed into a power transformer and cut power to RackSpace’s Dallas data center. When their backup power kicked in, the chillers failed to start, and lots of customer servers had to be shut down. Among the affected were GigaOM, 37 Signals, Webmaster World and Laughing Squid.

Google Analytics takes a break

Easily the most popular website traffic monitoring service on the web, Google Analytics can’t have problems without a lot of people noticing. And they did…

365 Main data center power outage

This major San Francisco data center outage back in July may have affected more big-name websites and services than any other incident in 2007: Craigslist, Technorati, LiveJournal, TypePad, AdBrite, the 1Up gaming network, Second Life and Yelp were among the affected. Let’s just say that backup power won’t do you much good if your generators fail to start, which is what happened here.

Twitter Troubles

Twitter seems to be the service that can do no wrong in the eyes of its users. Not even a total of six days of downtime has stopped the service from becoming one of the big successes in 2007. A recent move to a new data center will hopefully help their performance in 2008.

Ubuntu.com crashed by eager downloaders

When the 7.04 release of the popular Linux distribution was released in April, the Ubuntu.com website drowned in traffic to the extent that the site stopped working, and later had to use a simplified landing page to handle the load.

Shaky Blogger service

Google’s mega-popular Blogger service has had several hiccups in 2007. That, and Google also managed to remove their own blog by accident.

NaviSite data center migration goes wrong

When more than 175,000 websites are left stranded for several days, you just know that someone will notice…

T-Mobile data center flooded

Their main data center in Seattle was flooded after a torrent of more than four inches of rain early in December. The T-Mobile website, their activation portals and several other services stopped working.

Black Friday too much for e-stores?

People love a good deal. So much, in fact, that several large e-commerce websites couldn’t handle the pressure on Black Friday, including Sears.com and Macys.com.

Media Temple grid grinding

This web host has had a tough year after introducing their much-hyped grid hosting service late in 2006. In December, Media Temple gave their grid-service customers two months of credited hosting fees and apologized for recent performance problems.

The Registerfly drama

Major customer dissatisfaction with failing domain name renewals that struck this company early in 2007 wasn’t exactly helped by the significant amounts of downtime clocked by the RegisterFly website.

Cisco trouble

They may be responsible for a large part of the internet backbone, but they are definitely not immune to website trouble.

Conclusion

Each year the internet has its share of disasters and incidents of more or less serious nature. It’s an inevitable fact of life online. Hopefully 2008 will be a little less troublesome (and hopefully pigs will soon be able to fly).

Do you feel we missed something major? Let us know in the comments!

Sooner or later all websites run into trouble (even Google) or have to perform maintenance that takes them offline. However, there is a big difference between how different websites handle the resulting error or maintenance pages that will have to be shown to the user. Some lighten the mood with jokes, some are dry and to the point, and some drop the ball completely.

We make our living here at Pingdom by monitoring websites for problems, so we tend to stumble across more of these error pages than most people do. This post includes error and maintenance pages for 24 of the most popular Web 2.0 services out there. While two of them can definitely be considered examples of what NOT to do, the other 22 are here to give you plenty of inspiration and hopefully put a smile on your face.

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We all use personal computers and we all take them for granted in our everyday lives. It’s easy to forget that PCs have only been around for a couple of decades, and initially were nowhere near the powerhouses we have on our desks today.

For example, did you know that the first “portable” computer weighed 25 kg (55 lb) and cost close to $20,000, that the first laser printer was big enough to fill up most of a room, or that you basically had to build the first Apple computer yourself?

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We ran across a very creative use of Pingdom monitoring the other day. Most people use Pingdom to monitor the status of websites and servers, but Eric Nagel uses our monitoring service to keep track of the temperature in his outdoor hot tub (complete with rubber ducky).

Keep reading to learn how he did it.

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There are lots of vintage ad collections out there, and it’s always a fun to look through them. For your viewing pleasure, we have handpicked nine of the most fun, creative or just plain weird computer ads we have ever seen.

Inside you will find classic ads from Apple, Texas Instruments, IBM, BASF, Honeywell, Maxell and more.

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This is a weekly recurring post about noteworthy incidents on the Internet. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.

We are not going to be able to cover everything that happens out there, so if we omit anything that you feel is important or interesting, please feel free to add this information in the comments, preferably with a link to a source (such as a news article or service status page with relevant information).

This week includes the failed launch of a major EU initiative, as well as downtime for Yousendit and LiveJournal.

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