Issue no. 219 - 13 January 2002

• Brits' Net Service Twice As Clunky As Germans' - Report (Newsbytes) Research carried out by Support.com, the automated support services firm, has concluded that British Internet users are more than twice as prone to technical problems with their Internet service than their German peers.

Issue no. 214 - 23 November 2001

• U.K. Internet Users Hit By Three-Hour Outage (Newsbytes) Many dialup and broadband Internet users in the U.K. were hit badly by a major failure of British Telecom's Colossus IP backbone, and some users had to wait until much later in the day to see their service restored.

Issue no. 203 - 19 July 2001

• Can Microsoft weather its HailStorm? (CNET News.com) A partial outage of Microsoft's MSN Messenger service, now in its seventh day, is casting a shadow over a wide-ranging services strategy that Microsoft hopes will be its future.

Issue no. 187 - 17 February 2001

• Free E-Mail Gone Without a Trace (Wired) Free mail? More like vapor mail for ZDNet U.K. and Australia users. Subscribers of those services got a rude awakening last week when they found their free e-mail was gone, along with any information or messages they'd saved in their folders.

Issue no. 183 - 14 January 2001

• Weihnachtlicher SMS-Ansturm überlastet Handynetze (Heise) Peinliche Panne für die Mobilfunkbetreiber: Weil viele Handybesitzer pünktlich zum Fest ihre Weihnachtsgrüße per SMS loswerden wollten, waren die Mobilfunknetze streckenweise vollkommen überlastet.

Issue no. 163 - 9 July 2000

• Private bank email goes awry (ZDNet.uk) Hundreds of notes intended for one of Spain's largest banks are ending up on bulletin board service in Virginia. It's a case of mistaken identity, Internet style, and the story brings together a rural Virginia man who publishes a weekly shopper with a circulation of 10,000 and one of the world's 20 largest banks.

Issue no. 160 - 17 June 2000

• Computer glitches bring chaos to online banks (uk.internet.com) Technicians behind Egg and Cahoot, two of the UK's biggest internet banks, will today resume their investigations into what caused their websites to crash.

• Hotmail Clients Getting Steamed (Wired) After having no email for 10 days, Hotmail users have discovered another reason to be annoyed. Hotmail accounts for some of the 330,000 people who have been shut out of the system started working again but a number of customers were dismayed that all of their data, including addresses and saved messages, were erased.

Issue no. 145 - 26 February 2000

• Airline Reservation System Crashes Briefly (Reuters) The world's No. 1 computerized airline reservations system went down for about two hours, making life miserable for airlines, travel agencies and the traveling public.

Issue no. 136 - 12 December 1999

• Net Performance Decreases (Newsbytes) Last week the overall performance of online Websites decreased by a slight 2.5 percent over the previous week, reflecting the higher Internet traffic and increased online shopping activity.

Issue no. 132 - 11 November 1999

• WebTV grappling with email problem (CNET News.com) WebTV's email service was hit by delays all weekend.

Issue no. 131 - 4 November 1999

• Holy See - Überlastung: Vatikan schließt Mailbox des Papstes (dpa) (Pope got too much e-mail] Die Mailbox von Papst Johannes Paul II. ist wegen Überfüllung geschlossen worden. Das berichten heute italienische Zeitungen. Nach Angaben von Vatikan-Sprecher Joaquin Navarro-Valls erreichten das Oberhaupt der katholischen Kirche "zu viele Botschaften".

Issue no. 130 - 23 October 1999

• Denmark - email snafu (Europemedia) Free email service erases 80,000 users' messages

Issue no. 121 - 25 June 1999

• eBay blacks out yet again (CNET News.com) Despite a frantic, around-the-clock effort to keep the auction site running after two embarrassing and costly outages, visitors to eBay received no response from the site, marking at least the third unplanned outage in five days. see also EBay Blames Sun for Outages (Reuters)

Issue no. 119 - 7 June 1999

• SETI@home, FamilySearch hit gridlock (MSNBC) The FamilySearch site, a genealogy search portal operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been slammed with an average of 500 hits per second in the two days since its official launch. As a result, the site has set up the Internet equivalent of a time-specific ticketing system. Meanwhile, the SETI@home site, with more than 350,000 users, occasionally choked over the past day or so due to server overload.

Issue no. 118 - 21 May 1999

• Bids temporarily off at eBay (CNET News.com) Popular auction site eBay has extended some auctions because of continuing technical difficulties that have brought all bidding at eBay to a halt.

Issue no. 111 - 8 March 1999

• Paraguay Falls Off The Internet (Newsbytes) Paraguay's main name servers failed over the weekend and left many unable to connect to the country. While technically much of the country's Internet sites remained connected to the network, Web sites, e-mail and other traffic could only get through if users specified the numeric IP address rather than the domain name.

Issue no. 109 - 25 February 1999

• UK - Internet takes a break (BBC) The UK's Internet has suffered a severe and surprising blackout, just weeks before it transfers to new failsafe cables. The trouble began when a transatlantic cable was severed and back-up systems also failed. This left Britain's largest network, the Joint Academic Network (Janet), unable to communicate with North America for over 24 hours.

Issue no. 106 - 29 January 1999

• @Home suffering cracks in the foundation? (CNET News.com) A handful of service problems and proposed limits on data uploads have some @Home users feeling like they're being short-changed.

• Hotmail server on the blink (CNET News.com) With 30 million users, a little bit of technical difficulty can go a long way. Microsoft's MSN Hotmail lost the use of a server this morning, shutting what the company termed a "small percentage" of users out of their accounts.

Issue no. 104 - 17 January 1999

• Microsoft confirms April fools bug (ZDNet) Microsoft Windows users could become victims of an irksome April Fool's joke, come April 1, 2001. A bug will cause some Windows applications to behave as though it were one hour earlier than the correct time shown on the operating system's clock. Microsoft confirmed the bug, but said in most cases a repair would be no problem.

• USA - E-Mail on Impeachment Slows Senate Servers (New York Times) The Senate impeachment trial is taking its toll on more than the legislative process. A seven-fold increase in constituent e-mail has created a bottleneck for the Senate e-mail server, making electronic communication slow and unreliable.

Issue no. 101 - 17 December 1998

• EBay Boots Angry Users (Wired) EBay's system crash on Wednesday raised the ire of some of the online auction house's customers. Those who vented their frustration on the eBay's customer support board got a prompt response: suspension.

• Holiday E-Mail Overload Delay in AT&T Service (AP) Electronic holiday greetings containing graphics and audio clogged AT&T WorldNet’s computer servers earlier this week, creating a delay in e-mail delivery. Thousands of users of one of the nation’s largest Internet service providers faced delays of up to 45 minutes for sending and receiving e-mail.

Issue no. 100 - 11 December 1998

• San Francisco blackout snarls Web (CNET News.com) One of the worst blackouts in the region's history paralyzed much of the San Francisco Bay Area, knocking out power to nearly 1 million people and disrupting online operations in the process.

Issue no. 99 - 5 December 1998

• UK - Gremlins hit war graves site (BBC) Technical problems have limited access to the Internet site set up for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Issue no. 85 - 22 September 1998

• Clinton Webcast goes smoothly (USA Today) The Internet broadcast Monday of President Clinton's videotaped testimony appeared to go smoothly, possibly because interest wasn't as high as anticipated. All of the major news Web sites carried the video, which was shown online using a technology known as ''streaming video.'' That allows users to view the video without downloading the entire file, which is what Web surfers did Sept. 11 with the release of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report.

Issue no. 83 - 16 September 1998

• Net doesn't break down (ZDNet) It may have been a record traffic day on the Internet, but predictions that the Web would be driven to its knees did not come true. Only one in 10 attempts by Internet users to get access to the Web site of the House of Representatives succeeded on Friday afternoon after the report was posted, according to Keynote Systems, a San Mateo, California, firm that monitors the performance of the network. Half of all attempts to access top commercial news Web sites succeeded, the firm reported.

Issue no. 78 - 5 August 1998

• UUNet guarantees Internet access for business customers (InfoWorld Electric) UUNet Technologies on Tuesday put its backbone on the line, offering new service-level agreements to business customers that could cost the Internet access provider millions of dollars if there are outages, system slowdowns, or problems with leased lines. The service-level agreements are being provided to customers who have at least one-year contracts for frame-relay, dedicated 56Kbps, T-1, T-3, or OC-3 Internet access services. They are available now for U.S. customers and will be launched next month for U.S.-based multinational customers. Non-U.S. customers are expected to have them by the end of the year.

Issue no. 62 - 23 April 1998

• AT&T identifies cause of frame relay outage (PC Week) AT&T Corp. announced today that a combination of its own "inadequate" procedures and flawed software on its Cisco Systems Inc. BPX switching platform led to last week's crippling 22-hour outage of its entire frame relay network. see related story

Issue no. 61 - 22 April 1998

• Still No Cause For AT&T Outage (Inter@ctive Week) First the good news: After a network outage that began Monday afternoon and lasted close to 24 hours, AT&T Corp. said its frame relay services are fully restored. Now the bad news: Although the data communications carrier tracked the failure to two of its frame relay switches, it still hasn't diagnosed the exact cause of the downtime.

Issue no. 52 - 3 March 1998

• USA - State bill punishes ISP outages (News.com) A state bill has been introduced that would let customers request a refund if their online access is unexpectedly interrupted for more than four hours. The law would not apply if consumers had software or hardware problems or trouble connecting due to their local phone company. State Rep. Jack McGuire of Joliet, Illinois, is the official sponsor of the bill, although he admitted today that it is not high on his agenda and is not likely to pass this year.

Issue no. 51 - 26 February 1998

• America Online shut down by electrical fault (Reuters) America Online Inc.'s Internet service was shut down Monday night by an electrical problem the company said had a wider impact than a wave of electronic mail problems last year.

Issue no. 43 - 4 February 1998

• MAE West Suffers Outage, Bounces Back (Wired) A snafu during a planned upgrade at MAE-West, one of the nation's key switching facilities for Internet connectivity, led to a serious interruption of service early Sunday morning.

Issue no. 36 - 15 January 1998

• Ice storm cuts some Net access (News.com) The "storm of the century" that hit eastern Canada last week has left many residents disconnected from the Net and other forms of communication.

Issue no. 34 - 8 January 1998

• 'Unscheduled Maintenance' Takes Down Amazon (Wired) "Unscheduled maintenance" is the semi-Orwellian term Amazon.com is using to describe an interruption in service. The Net's leading bookseller reported today that its Web site would be temporarily closed for an estimated few hours while an internal technical problem is resolved.

• HotMail's Twelve-Hour Partial E-Mail Outage Solved (Newsbytes) The free Internet-based HotMail e-mail service suffered a partial outage for 12 hours Monday, starting at 3:30 a.m. and lasting into the afternoon. A spokesperson acknowledged the problem but dismissed it as temporary and not severe, since there was no loss of subscriber e-mail.

• Telco error causes ISP outage (News.com) It only took moments for a Bell Atlantic Internet employee to accidentally cripple a fellow online provider's service. But it was 27 hours before the company's Net access was fully restored.

Issue no. 20 - 27 November 1997

• Germany - Deutsche Telekom to refund online customers (Internetnews.com - Reuters) German telecommunications group Deutsche Telekom AG said on Tuesday it would reimburse subscribers of its online service T-Online for failed attempts to log onto the service.

Issue no. 18 - 22 November 1997

• America Online Says E-Mail Disrupted Service (internetnews.com) America Online Inc. (AOL) said a hardware problem with a computer server for handling electronic mail kept many of its 10 million members from logging on to the service for more than an hour Tuesday morning.

Issue no. 15 - 11 November 1997

• USA - Internet announcement backfires (BBC) The historic decision to announce the fate of the British au pair, Louise Woodward, on the Internet backfired when a power cut prevented the message from being sent.

• USA - Reduced Woodward Charge Jams Websites (Tech Wire) Internet servers of news organizations were overloaded Monday as Superior Court Judge Hiller Zobel reduced the charge and the sentence of British au pair Louise Woodward.

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