Internet Woes
Over the last few weeks I have really started to notice just how fragile the technology that we have come depend on really is. Of course I am one of the people with an inside view and completely understand that it is and am not caught by surprise, but I do wonder about the rest of the world who just take for granted that the technology is always going to be there. Of course the technology I am really talking about here is the internet and the network that supports it. But by that I also mean all the smart devices out there from your simple MP3 player to the more complex smart phones that do everything but the dishes.
Some items of note over the last few weeks that I have seen that are major indicators of just where we are and how close to the brink we may actually be follow below. Note that while some of these may be smaller size, new upstarts that are just experiencing some growth pains, some of these noted have been around for a while, have had stability and should be able to maintain it.
- Google – It has been a few weeks back now, but Google had some hiccups with some stuff done on Gmail. The official word is that some information pointing things to the new equipment (think about it like the phone book pointing to what names are found at what numbers and where those numbers are located). Regardless, Gmail took hit. I am not completely sure it did not do some other damage at the time, as I had a hard time getting to Google anything during the outage, including the Google search engine for a bit there.
- Facebook – Really starting to get a black eye of late with problems. I think in truth it is the amount of growth that they have experienced in the last few months catching up to them and they are hitting an upper limit of what they have resources to handle. But it will not take long with the things like not being able to login, timeouts occurring at random (is this related to Colorado below?), not seeing anything but a blank profile when you do, buttons to go forward/backward not working seemingly at random times when browsing through things, and just loosing things in general – sometimes forever gone and sometimes just a few minutes and they are back. And speaking of Facebook, I finally figured out one thing and realize the utter stupidity of this. I kept loosing messages as I was typing them and trying to send. Realized the default option on messages is cancel, not send as it is everywhere else and what makes logical sense – who designed that form/page?
- Timeouts – Not that any server is ever actually down – at least according to stats seen at various times regarding the servers, but I keep getting snagged when my routes from here in the, well, where am I geographically – Midwest? Southeast? Anyway, when from here in Kentucky I am hitting the West Coast servers a lot of time I time out at places in Colorado. (See my previous post about Hops and Trace Routes to know how I know that). No rhyme or reason that I can find, as it is not always the same route. I do know it really aggravating when you are in the middle of working something and save to get a time out. Almost enough to motivate me to start looking for personal hosting here on the East Coast – but I would still hit the snag as most of the majors are on the West Coast.
- Twitter – First off a week ago they had a semi vicious attack. I do not think it amounted to anything, but it had the potential to be ugly. Then after that was offer and I went to tweet about why I had been twittering they apparently lost a ‘node’ and I still could not tweet. Loosing a node is geek talk and could mean any number of things, but I am guess it was an entire section of networking equipment went offline because of some front end router failure or some such as that.
- Wiring – Not to long ago so a major circuit between two points just stop working because a little moisture finally got to some contact. As it was being traced back and we snapped off wires at each node and redid connections until finally finding the right one I was amazed. Amazed by the slime, rust, dust and dirt that was in the boxes and covers between here and the point of failure. Amazed that we went through four connectors before going up a pole a street over to finally find the problem. Amazed with the number of pairs of wire that were not being used or had been dropped off at some point in the past that anything made sense and that any given pair was still working.
I got this when I tried to get on Facebook a bit ago: Account Temporarily Unavailable. Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes. Do you think they read what I wrote?
Izf google has problems I can as well shut internet down. Somehow life without google, gmail and its other services is not the same :D
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