Amazon website, mobile apps down in hourlong outage

Just as many people are doing their back-to-school shopping, Amazon.com's website crashed for the better part of an hour Monday.

The downed site was first noted at 2:48 p.m. ET Monday on Twitter. It was online around 3:35 p.m.

Amazon.com showed a sense of humor while its site and mobile apps were down briefly Monday afternoon. The website showed this page, including covers of children's books titled "I'm Sorry My Bad," "Oops!" and the video "Grave Mistake."

White the website was down, users either received a broken link or were given the message, "Oops. We're very sorry, but we're having trouble doing what you just asked us to do. Please give us another chance -- click the Back button on your browser and try your request again. Or start from the beginning on our homepage."

Amazon's apps for Android and the iPhone also were down during the same period, either not responding, having slow uploads and not allowing users to put items in their shopping carts.

The Web tracking site downforeveryoneorjustme.com reported at 3:30 p.m. that Amazon had crashed.

Amazon's apps for Android, above, and iOS were down during the outage.

Amazon.com, headquartered in Seattle, is the world's largest online retailer.

Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing service stayed online, according to the AWS' Service Health Dashboard.

When Amazon crashed, users were quick to voice their complaints on Twitter and poke a bit of fun at the giant e-commerce site.

"Amazon.com is down. I am having a hard time breathing. Hold me internet. Hold me," tweeted @williamsavona.

And @qhardy tweeted, "It's not that Amazon's site is down. We've just purchased all the crap in the world and they have to restock."

It's been a tough couple of days for major online sites.

Last Friday, Google, along with some of its properties, including Gmail and YouTube, went down for about five minutes.

On Wednesday, The New York Times' website and app went down for nearly an hour and a half, just before it was to perform a scheduled maintenance update.

"Well, it helps that Amazon's ease of use is unparalleled," said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research. "I think if someone went to the site and it was down, they'd have gone to another site. There is a short-term revenue loss here. But ultimately, it won't cost Amazon any customers over the long run."

This article, Amazon website, mobile apps down in hour-long outage, was originally published at Computerworld.com.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, on Google+, or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed. Her email address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

See more by Sharon Gaudin on Computerworld.com.

Read more about e-business in Computerworld's E-business Topic Center.

View the original article here

Microsoft restores Outlook.com after three-day outage -- sort of

Microsoft on Saturday apologized for a three-day partial outage of Outlook.com and said the email service was back up and running, only to note hours later that problems still plagued some customers.

Early Saturday, the Redmond, Wash. company said it had finally resolved Outlook.com's issues, which stemmed from a failure in a caching service of Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), the popular synchronization service widely used to sync smartphones and tablets with company email, contacts and calendars stored on Microsoft Exchange Server systems.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Microsoft's 'terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad' week. | Get your websites up to speed with HTML5 today using the techniques in InfoWorld's HTML5 Deep Dive PDF how-to report. | For a quick, smart take on the news you'll be talking about, check out InfoWorld Tech Brief -- subscribe today. ]

"We want to apologize to everyone who was affected by the outage, and we appreciate the patience you have shown us as we worked through the issues," Microsoft said in a note appended to its services status board.

On Wednesday, Outlook.com, the SkyDrive cloud storage service and the Peoples contacts application suffered partial outages that began around 10 a.m. ET. While the Peoples problem was fixed about five hours later, SkyDrive's was not fully resolved until Thursday around 4 p.m. ET.

Some users of Outlook.com, however, were unable to access email on mobile devices that relied on EAS -- a category that includes iPhones, whose iOS uses EAS for synchronization -- until around 4:30 a.m. ET Saturday.

During the outage, Microsoft said, the cache service failure "caused these devices to receive an error and continuously try to connect to our service. This resulted in a flood of traffic that our services did not handle properly."

Microsoft said it had already taken steps to prevent similar problems in the future. "[We] have made two key changes ... one that involved increasing network bandwidth in the affected part of the system, and one that involved changing the way error handling is done for devices using Exchange ActiveSync."

The cache flood problem Microsoft described sounded reminiscent of the trouble earlier this year that the company documented in iOS 6.1-powered iPhones and iPads which affected not only on-premise Exchange servers within enterprises, but also Microsoft's own infrastructure, including its Office 365 subscription service.

But Outlook.com's problems were not completely behind it Saturday morning. Around 2:30 p.m. ET, Microsoft again logged a problem on the status board, saying, "A small percentage of mobile users may experience intermittent issues while syncing email."

As of 9 p.m. ET Saturday, that problem had not been resolved.

View the original article here

Update: Microsoft restores Outlook.com after three-day outage

Computerworld - Microsoft on Saturday apologized for a three-day partial outage of Outlook.com and said the email service was back up and running, only to note hours later that problems still plagued some customers.

Early Saturday, the Redmond, Wash. company said it had finally resolved Outlook.com's issues, which stemmed from a failure in a caching service of Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), the popular synchronization service widely used to sync smartphones and tablets with company email, contacts and calendars stored on Microsoft Exchange Server systems.

"We want to apologize to everyone who was affected by the outage, and we appreciate the patience you have shown us as we worked through the issues," Microsoft said in a note appended to its services status board.

On Wednesday, Outlook.com, the SkyDrive cloud storage service and the Peoples contacts application suffered partial outages that began around 10 a.m. ET. While the Peoples problem was fixed about five hours later, SkyDrive's was not fully resolved until Thursday around 4 p.m. ET.

Some users of Outlook.com, however, were unable to access email on mobile devices that relied on EAS -- a category that includes iPhones, whose iOS uses EAS for synchronization -- until around 4:30 a.m. ET Saturday.

During the outage, Microsoft said, the cache service failure "caused these devices to receive an error and continuously try to connect to our service. This resulted in a flood of traffic that our services did not handle properly."

Microsoft said it had already taken steps to prevent similar problems in the future. "[We] have made two key changes ... one that involved increasing network bandwidth in the affected part of the system, and one that involved changing the way error handling is done for devices using Exchange ActiveSync."

The cache flood problem Microsoft described sounded reminiscent of the trouble earlier this year that the company documented in iOS 6.1-powered iPhones and iPads which affected not only on-premise Exchange servers within enterprises, but also Microsoft's own infrastructure, including its Office 365 subscription service.

But Outlook.com's problems were not completely behind it Saturday morning. Around 2:30 p.m. ET, Microsoft again logged a problem on the status board, saying, "A small percentage of mobile users may experience intermittent issues while syncing email."

Microsoft said the problem was resolved at around 8 a.m. ET Sunday.

The Outlook.com outages were an embarrassment to Microsoft for multiple reasons, including a boast the week before that its Office 365 cloud-based service exceeded 99.9% uptime each of the last four quarters, and new attacks against rival Google Gmail in another run of its "Scroogled" campaign that kicked off Aug. 9.

Microsoft touts its own Outlook.com as an alternative to Gmail.

In fact, the latest Outlook.com outage was the second this year within weeks of a new Scroogled attack. In mid-March, about five weeks after a different Scroogled round, Microsoft's online email service went dark for about 15 hours.

Outlook.com has logged numerous interruptions in the last 60 days, including on June 14 and 27; July 1, 2, 3, 11, 12-14 and 25-26; and the event that began Aug. 14.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at  @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His email address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

See more by Gregg Keizer on Computerworld.com.

Read more about Web Apps in Computerworld's Web Apps Topic Center.

Small and midsize businesses are moving to the cloud to host their communications capabilities. Learn how enterprise-quality phone benefits, online management, conferencing, auto attendant, and ease of use are built into a system that is half the cost of a PBX.

Read now.

View the original article here