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Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Down Goes Blogger 

Monday was supposed to be a very busy day at this newly-updated blog. I had added lots of links (see the growing list in the right-hand column) along with a Google search box (scroll to the bottom of this page), as well as a box to subscribe to the new No Holds Barred Google group so that many of my existing mailing list contacts along with other interested folks could receive updates on this blog and my other media activities. I had also sent out several other e-mails and made phone calls to help promote this blog, and wanted to solicit comments on which way to take this thing.

Then, down went Blogger.

During the day I received some e-mails from friends and colleagues saying that they couldn't access the blog. I tried, and it did go back up, but only for a while.

In the evening EST, it only got worse. This apparently was part of a widespread outage at Blogger, a Google company, that even affected many of their own help pages, such as status.blogger.com. This outage also has been discussed on the Blogger Google group in a thread called "Blogger down?" as well as on the techie board digg.com .

The blog went back up several hours later, and hopefully will stay up for a nice long spell. But it is hard to assess the damage that was done to this particular blog, since Monday was supposed to be a sort of coming out party for it, and ended in this near-disaster.

This has been a bad couple of months for me because of repeated outages by various major communications companies. For eight days in October, the entire Verizon phone and Internet services were out in my neighborhood. This prompted calls to the New York Public Service Commission, and, of course, to Verizon billing when they did not give me the full refund due without another complaint.

I have always had trouble with Time Warner Cable and its incompetent predecessors, so switching to Roadrunner would be like trying to heal a wound by pouring drain cleaner into it. I mentioned their latest outage, however brief, in my report of the Taylor-Hopkins 2 fight Saturday night.

Since I have been mainly working online for the past decade, these outages caused by these major corporations have made doing my work that much more difficult. We rely more and more on these communications giants to do our jobs, obtain health care information, stay in touch with friends and family, get all sorts of other information, etc. Yet the level of service needed to make this online life comfortable just is not there. Nor would it be better just relying on the phone, since the recent Verizon outage was part of a series of major outages all over New York City that left many thousands of customers unhooked.

So I called from my landline to my long-time friend and editor, Todd Hester, on his cell to talk about this and some other things we needed to discuss. After a couple of minutes, the call was dropped.

If it wasn't snowing here, I probably would have already been in the barroom where I belonged anyway.

Comments:
PS - Blogger explains the outage here:

http://buzz.blogger.com/2005/12/blogspot-is-happy-again.html#links
 
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1 Comments:

PS - Blogger explains the outage here:

http://buzz.blogger.com/2005/12/blogspot-is-happy-again.html#links

By Blogger Eddie Goldman, at 1:50 PM  

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