14 DAY TRIAL // It's not something that you can dress up and present it like it's something positive. It's a Top Worst after all, or in another term, to make it look less gloomy and filled with black-capped and masked bytes, let's call it "Top Incidents".
Royal Pingdom put this top together to note the year that passed in other ways than the classic concept floating around the holidays, that of "it was pretty good, next year will be better". Apparently, that makes them and other Grinch-like sites and people sick to their core. Ok, that might have been a slight exaggeration, but bare with me.
The Great Skype Outage caused by a Microsoft Windows update is there at the top and deservedly so, millions of users having had to suffer from it for almost two whole days. I don't know why I compare this to a major city without running water for the same period of time. That's how big communication has gotten to be nowadays.
After that comes a silly one, emphasis on stupid and unbelievable. A month ago a trucker lost control of his vehicle and rammed into a power transformer. As a result, RackSpace's Dallas data center was in the dark because, when their backups kicked in, the chillers failed to start, forcing a lot of customers to go through the shut down procedure unwillingly.
Similar to that, a major San Francisco data center outage, in July, affected more big-name websites and services than any other incident happening in 2007: Craiglist, Technocrati, LiveJournal, TypePad, AdBrite, Second Life and Yelp to name a few. In the same "taking a short break" category, we find Google Analytics. The bad part about belonging to Google is that nothing goes unnoticed. Bad luck for Google, better luck next year, along with CISCO, who have also had major website trouble. Seeing as they are responsible for a large part of the Internet backbone? figure it out why they are here, in the "incidents" list.
Back to the "stupid incidents" category for a? flood. Not the bytes and download type of flood, but the honest to God rain pouring from the sky type. That happened to the T-Mobile main data center in Seattle, earlier in December, and had their website, activation portals and several other services going bye-bye. Eager beaver downloaders caused trouble for Ubuntu.com, when the 7.04 release first came out, back in April. I had this in the "stupid" category because if you know that you have what the crowd needs, you'll provide it. You gotta walk the walk if you claim that you can talk the talk. Bit of a stretch for that expression, but I think it fits. Other silly downtimes came on Black Friday from Sears.com and Macys.com. I guess they never thought that shoppers might use their PCs for the job on that particular day?
Speaking of downtime, the Media Temple grid, Registerfly and Twitter hold each others hands and dance on the respective stage for failing to provide for their users in the most annoying way possible.
And last, but not least, Google's Blogger had a bit of a rough time in 2007 on several occasions. You already know about them, so I won't twist the knife in the fresh wound. That concludes the top. Thanks for tuning in, we'll see each others next year.