downtime

Twitter Blog Confirms Downtime Issues

Having a look at the official Twitter blog, Twitter has announced that they have detected errant API usage through their Jabber resources.

We found an errant API project eating way too much of our Jabber (a flavor of instant messenger) resources. This activity (which we’ve corrected) had an affect of overloading our main database, resulting in the error pages and slowness most people are now encountering.

We’re bringing services back online now. Some will be slower than others for a while, and we’ll be watching IM and IM-based API clients very closely. We’ll also be taking steps to avoid this behavior in the future.

For god sakes, I hope this is what has been causing all of their issues lately and they get this problem fixed as soon as possible. I need my Twitter fix!

Skype Blaming Redmond For Outage

Skype.com LogoAfter initially telling users that the downtime experienced last week was due to an authentication glitch, Skype is now blaming Microsoft for the downtime. Here is the supposedly real reason why their service went down:

“The disruption was initiated by a massive restart of our user’s computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine software update.” This is presumably the Windows updates that were sent out on Patch Tuesday last week, which required the PC to be restarted.

“The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources,” the company adds. “This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.”

Maybe it’s just me, but this seems like a lame excuse. Come on guys, Microsoft can’t be blamed for everything. This excuse sounds like something those guys from The Onion would cook up.