Internet slip-ups that had us talking, brooding, laughing, crying, and losing (money and traffic)

Seeing as I’m still holding onto the notion that it’s 2007, I figure now would be a good time to write one of those retrospective, year-end posts. I have a monstrous pile of New Year’s resolutions that I don’t feel like tackling, so I made sure to find a topic that allows me to fight off the arrival of 2008 (for at least a few more days). Lucky for you, it’s also pretty interesting.

Here is Pingdom’s take on the biggest internet blunders of 2007. The post highlights 13 incidents and links to a slew of related articles for each one. There were a few that I was aware of, like the NaviSite fiasco that I posted about in November (my very first post!), and the Black Friday service issues that several big-name internet retailers experienced.

Other notable blunders that were featured on the list include: Twitter’s six days of downtime throughout the year; the Skype outage that occurred in August; the 365 Main data center outage that affected sites like Craigslist, Technorati, TypePad, Second Life, and Yelp; and the RackSpace incident when a truck rammed into a power transformer, cutting off power to its Dallas data center.

What do these incidents teach us? That no website or service is infallible; that very few outages go unnoticed these days; and that you shouldn’t rely on a server, a hosting company, or an internet service without some type of backup plan, especially if an outage will cost you a sizeable chunk of revenue. Even though technology is constantly being improved upon, outages will never cease to exist. And that, my friends, is why tech staffs exist (and why they probably make more money than you do).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 and is filed under Tech companies, Tech issues, Webhosting matters, ecommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.