Despite whatever bad news you read in this article, we encourage you to remain positive. It’s just human nature to have a curious interest in the calamities of others. So if that’s what gives you your kicks, feel free to enjoy our 2nd annual dispatch on some of the most interesting outages of the past […]
IT systems go down for a lot of reasons. Some downtime causes are obvious, while others take some time to understand. And still others are just plain comical. In this article we’ll have a look at different approaches to assigning blame for outages, and we’ll offer a short list of our own. The concept of downtime applies […]
No one needs to explain to you the virtues of being proactive. Of course, no one can make you (or this writer) do it either. You may know that you should change the timing belt on your car every 60,000 miles or so, but it’s even easier to do nothing about it — until your […]
The internet is replete with Top Ten lists and other rankings. But the criteria for distinguishing between #1 and #10 is often no more than personal whim. So with the caveat that these are not necessarily the worst or the biggest, we’ve decided to list and describe some of the most interesting outages in the […]
Service providers do everything they know how to avoid downtime. Generally the best practice is not to touch a live network. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But change is inevitable, and eventually every network or system will need improvements. The trick is to handle these changes with little to no disruption of running […]
“The website is down again!” That can be pretty frustrating. In the heat of the moment, most of us don’t really care why it is down — we just want back online. But the curious user may want to know more. What could make a web server unreachable? Why do they go down in the […]
If you went to bestbuy.com and the site was unavailable, how long would it take for you to go to amazon.com or elsewhere to find what you wanted? On average, it’s less than 30 seconds; it used to be much longer, but our society has grown impatient. If you’re not available when customers are looking […]
Downtime is a dirty word in the IT business. Unplanned outages are unacceptable and should not be tolerated. In a universe where customers expect services to be available 99.999% of the time, any time your IT service offering is down is costly to your business. And the true cost of downtime may be more than […]
Yes, if you want to receive alert messages to your phone as an SMS or Text Message, you need to do two things. First, you need to create an alert list. Secondly, you need to edit your user profile and add a mobile number. To access your user profile, click the ACCOUNT link in the […]
On Thursday night August 20th, 2015, a blast occurred in the basement of 811 West Wilshire Blvd. in downtown Los Angeles taking out an on-site power station leaving 12 buildings in the area without utility power for much of Friday, as reported by ABC News and other sources. The outage significantly affected major network provider Level 3 […]