GeekSpeak

No, You’re Not Seeing Things, Craigslist, Technorati, Alexa, etc are ALL BROKEN Right Now

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ July 24, 2007 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

First, San Francisco and the surrounding area is experiencing a major blackout. Lots of companies based around these parts (about 35 miles north of silicon valley) are experiencing issues from that.

In addition, a disgruntled employee came in to a major hosting facility today and “went postal”. See A Drunk Employee Kills All of the Websites You Care About.

Go ahead, try clicking through:
craigslist
technorati
alexa
sixapart
yelp

A friend of mine has also reported that Digg has been down intermittently, but I haven’t personally noticed that one.

I was trying to use craigslist about an hour ago, and it seemed to come back online here and there — it failed to respond to a ping, then replied on a tracert, then 404′d from my browser again. Probably an effective denial of service attack (i.e., too many users, not enough servers) because they have one backup server running under someone’s desk on a battery instead of the normal cluster of multiple, load balanced web servers.

Interestingly, I’m scoping some hosting space at the moment for a client. This makes me thing it’s a better plan to manage my own load balancer and have two single web servers in two different colocation data centers on both coasts. It might even be cheaper…!