"Massive" Amazon Server Troubles Take Down Much of Internet

 

 If you've had some trouble online today, you're far from alone. Various Internet services from Snapchat to Netflix to Reddit and were down, and many others had problems because of an Amazon Web Services server outage. The trouble supposedly started today, Monday October 20, at 2:40 AM EST, possibly at one of their largest datacenters in northern Virginia. There were supposedly "over 1,000 businesses impacts, including many banks." The total damage done may be in the billions of dollars. 

 

Second Life was affected as well, the Grid Status report showing "A service provider for Second Life is currently experiencing an outage which is affecting the Destinations page: secondlife.com/destinations/" Search was affected as well. A couple friends told me they had problems getting on. 

 

Supposedly the data engineers have taken care of the trouble, though this is a reminder of how many companies use Amazon servers, and what can happen when something big goes wrong. 

 

Sources, CNN, Techradar 

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

Winter Storm Could Mean Outages

 

 

 "The Big Chill" isn't just a movie you can rent these days. This week, a winter storm is making it's way east from the Great Plains across the middle of the country. It starts dropping snow west of the Mississippi on Tuesday, and will continue Wednesday and Thursday as it moves towards the Atlantic. In it's path are places that don't usually see much snow, such as northern Mississippi and Alabama and northeastern North Carolina. There is a risk of power outages, and of course Internet interruptions. So Second Life residents in the area should be prepared for being temporarily offline. 

Source: https://weather.com

 

Bixyl Shuftan

 

FaceBook Hit With 14 Hour Outage

If you tried to get on Facebook yesterday but couldn't, you were far from alone. On Wednesday March 13, the social network was hit with an outage that made it not accessible to most of it's users. The disruption lasted for about fourteen hours, it's worst in over a decade.

Facebook announced the outage through another social network: Twitter, "We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible." The cause of the trouble has not been officially announced, though Facebook denied it was a Distributed Denial of Service attack. One NBC reporter stated the problem came from "overloaded" databases.

The problem was worldwide, and numbers in Europe and Asia are reportedly still having trouble.  Instagram and WhatsApp, which are owned by Facebook, were also down.

Reactions from people varied from people complaining they couldn't message to friends, to people poking fun at themselves that they had no idea what to do, to some wondering if this was a reminder about how many have become dependent on social networks. The last time Facebook was down for this long was in 2008 when it had 150 million users. Today, over two billion use it.

Sources: BBC, NBC, Twitter

Bixyl Shuftan

Grid Hiccup Disrupts Second Life Saturday Night/Sunday Morning

Residents going about Second Life on Saturday night and early Sunday morning found things weren't quite right. Objects wouldn't rezz. Notecards couldn't be made. And some objects when clicked wouldn't work. Furthermore, residents trying to log on were often blocked from doing so. As it turned out, Linden Lab was performing "unscheduled maintenance" on the Grid, as shown by the Grid Status Report.

[Posted 7:35pm PDT, November 3, 2012] We are currently performing an unscheduled inventory server maintenance. During this time, some residents may be logged off and will temporarily be unable to log in for a brief period. This maintenance may also disrupt transactions and logins. Please check back here for updates.

[Posted 11:58pm PDT, 03 November 2012]We are currently undergoing unscheduled maintenance to Second Life. This may cause some Residents to be logged out, or prevent some from being able to log inworld, or even into Secondlife. com Please keep an eye on this blog for updates.

It wasn't until 9AM SL time (12 Noon EST) That the Grid Status Report declared everything had been fixed. Among the events disrupted was the Burn2 Temple Burn, of which the "Australian/Pacific Burn" scheduled at 4AM SL time had been rescheduled for Monday. In the meantime, residents found other places to go to, such as World of Warcraft, Minecraft, or funning around on the SL Universe forums.

It should also be noted that some residents from the area hit by Hurricane Sandy, aka the "Frankenstorm," are still unable to get on Second Life normally due to evacuation, or unreliable power.

Bixyl Shuftan