[tt] NYT: As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll

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As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll New York Times, 8.7.6 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/technology/06outage.html

By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO -- Alex Payne, a 24-year-old Internet engineer here,
has devised a way to answer a commonly asked question of the digital
age: Is my favorite Web site working today?

In March, Mr. Payne created downforeveryoneorjustme.com, as in,
"Down for everyone, or just me?" It lets visitors type in a Web
address and see whether a site is generally inaccessible or whether
the problem is with their own connection.

"I had seen that question posed so often," said Mr. Payne, who
perhaps not coincidentally works at Twitter, a Web messaging and
social networking site that is itself known for frequent downtime.
"Technology companies have branded the Internet as a place that is
always on and where information is always available. People are
disappointed and looking for answers when it turns out not to be
true."

There is plenty of disappointment to go around these days. Such
technology stalwarts as Yahoo, Amazon.com and Research in Motion,
the company behind the BlackBerry, have all suffered embarrassing
technical problems in the last few months.

About a month ago, a sudden surge of visitors to Mr. Payne's site
began asking about the normally impervious Amazon. That site was
ultimately down for several hours over two business days, and
Amazon, by some estimates, lost more than a million dollars an hour
in sales.

The Web, like any technology or medium, has always been susceptible
to unforeseen hiccups. Particularly in the early days of the Web,
sites like eBay and Schwab.com regularly went dark.

But since fewer people used the Internet back then, the stakes were
much lower. Now the Web is an irreplaceable part of daily life, and
Internet companies have plans to make us even more dependent on it.

Companies like Google want us to store not just e-mail online but
also spreadsheets, photo albums, sales data and nearly every other
piece of personal and professional information. That data is
supposed to be more accessible than information tucked away in the
office computer or filing cabinet.

The problem is that this ideal requires Web services to be available
around the clock -- and even the Internet's biggest companies
sometimes have trouble making that happen.

Last holiday season, Yahoo's system for Internet retailers, Yahoo
Merchant Solutions, went dark for 14 hours, taking down thousands of
e-commerce companies on one of the busiest shopping days of the
year. In February, certain Amazon services that power the sites of
many Web start-up companies had a day of intermittent failures,
knocking many of those companies offline.

The causes of these problems range widely: it might be system
upgrades with unintended consequences, human error (oops, wrong
button) or even just old-fashioned electrical failures. Last month,
an electrical explosion in a Houston data center of the Planet, a
Web hosting company, knocked thousands of Web businesses off the
Internet for up to five days.

"It was prolonged torture," said Grant Burhans, a Web entrepreneur
from Florida whose telecommunications- and real-estate-related Web
sites were down for four days, costing him thousands of dollars in
lost business.

Web addicts who find themselves shut out of their favorite Web sites
tend to fill blogs and online bulletin boards with angry invective
about broken promises and interrupted routines.

The volatile emotions around Web downtime are perhaps most prevalent
in the discussion around Twitter, on which users post updates on who
they are with, where they are, and what they are doing.

According to Pingdom, a Web monitoring firm, Twitter was down for 37
hours this year through April -- by far more than any other major
social networking Web site.

Instead of simply dumping the service and moving on with their
lives, Twitter users have responded with an endless stream of
rancor, creating "Is Twitter Down?" T-shirts, blog rants and YouTube
parodies, and posting copies of Twitter's various artfully designed
error messages.

"This is a free service. It's not like anyone's life is depending on
Twitter," said Laura Fitton, a consultant and self-described
passionate Twitter user.

"Twitter is all about the things we discover we have in common, so
right there, Twitter failing is a huge thing we have in common," she
said. "It's fun to complain to each other and commiserate."

Twitter has said its downtime is the result of rapidly growing
demand and fundamental mistakes in its original architecture.

Jesse Robbins, a former Amazon executive who was responsible for
keeping Amazon online from 2004 to 2006, says the outcries over
failures are understandable.

"When these sites go away, it's a sudden loss. It's like you are
standing in the middle of Macy's and the power goes out," he said.
"When the thing you depend on to live your daily life suddenly goes
away, it's trauma."

He says Web services should be held to the same standard of
reliability as the older services they aim to replace. "These
companies have a responsibility to people who rely and depend on
them, just as people going over a public bridge expect that the
bridge won't suddenly collapse."

By some measures, despite the high-profile failures, the Internet is
performing better than ever.

"There are millions of Web sites and billions of Web pages around
the world," said Umang Gupta, chief executive of Keynote Systems,
which monitors companies' Web performance. "These big
high-visibility problems are actually very rare."

But perhaps they are not rare enough. One morning last month, Google
App Engine, a service that lets people run interactive Web
applications, was unavailable for several hours.

Among those affected was Mr. Payne, who had just shifted
downforeveryoneorjustme.com over to Google's servers. It was
inaccessible as well.