Written on 4th June 2009
11 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
YouTube is down (or was at the time of posting this), their blog is down too as they oddly didn’t have the sense to host it under a sub domain.
We’ll keep you updated, but for now, here are a few alternative video sites that are bound to keep you entertained (but that you should also checked out a long time ago)
Aniboom: A site for professional and semi-professional animators to show off their work and market it to producers
Written on 15th May 2009
6 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
It appears so.
At this moment in time, many blogspot blogs aren’t loading, YouTube is either failing to load or unsearchable and embedded videos aren’t loading elsewhere. Gmail is failing to load in some locations and more importantly google search is showing frequent server errors.
This is not good, particularly as its just 24 hours since the last officially downtime.
How are things on your end?
Update 1: This may once again be location specific. Reports from people in the US suggest they are only having issues with YouTube and some with GMail.
This is breaking news, more to come as we hear it.
Written on 14th May 2009
8 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
There are numerous reports floating round the Twittersphere and blogosphere of various Google sites either not loading at all or loading very slowly.
Sites including Google Reader, Analytics, Maps and Google Maps are showing dramatically slow loading times – if loading at all.
It appears to not just be Google’s own sites however but also sites with Google related services such as analytics, adsense, double click etc.
This is a breaking story, we’ll give you more updates as and when we hear it. For now, Yahoo can enjoy a bit of the search limelight.
Update 1:
Google has posted an update on the apps dashboard saying that they are aware of issues affecting a ’small subset’ of GMail users – but say this may also be affecting other services as well.
Update 2:
Outages appear to be specific to the US (RWW have comments a plenty from US sufferers) and certain parts of Europe. UK and Middle East appear to be in the clear as well as most of the Far East. Australasia is still unconfirmed.
Update 4: Google SVP of Operations Urs Hoelzle has posted the following explanation to the Official Google Blog:
This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern…
Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.
An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and “always on,” so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.
Apple received a lot of criticism lately for the .Mac to MobileMe transition. But Google today demonstrated that online email can be tough. Gmail has been down for a while now with no information except an error message.
If you need to get to your email you can still access the HTML basic version of Gmail. Even the professional Gmail app is down for the first time in 1,5 years. The Google Calendar and other Google apps seem to be working at this moment.
Oh well…
UPDATED: The 502 Service Temporarily Overloaded message is gone. Gmail is up again. We can all relax again…
It is ironic that today Google AdSense is down with a “The Google AdSense website is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later. We apologize for any inconvenience” message in 27 languages. AdSense is Google’s ad-placing program. It is the program that puts ads on website and blogs. It seems that ads are being served but the site to monitor and manage them just seems down.
Google Adwords, the ad-selling system where advertisers pay money to advertise on Google or on individual websites, is still up.
Site maintenance on April 12 at 10am PDT
Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, April 12th from 10am to 2pm PDT. You won’t be able to log in to your account, but we’ll continue to serve ads to your pages and track your earnings as usual.
Located in a different time zone? Here’s the maintenance start time in a number of cities around the world:
Ottawa – 1 pm Saturday
London – 6 pm Saturday
Hyderabad – 10:30 pm Saturday
Hong Kong – 1 am Sunday
Canberra – 3 am Sunday
My suggestion to Google: put a link to that blogpost on your error page. Not every Adsense subscriber reads the Adsense blog.
Yesterday I read a post (can’t find it!) that explained how to get more subscribers to your RSS feeds. One tip was to show the amount of subscribers to your readers once that amount gets above 300. If you have more than 300 readers, they argued, that would show that you have a serious blog and that would make it more interesting to follow. In the previous two weeks we quickly grew to 3000+ subscribers so yesterday we included the Feedburner counter in the menubar here.
Unfortunately Feedburner is experiencing some trouble since Sunday. At first an error at FeedBlitz caused a spike in some Feedburner accounts of more than 200%. At ProBlogger the subscriber count leapt from around 39,000 to 41,000 and then to 100,000 subscribers. We haven’t seen such dramatic changes but Feedburner did stop updating all feeds altogether on Sunday.
A lot of blogs now depend on Feedburner to give some insight to the popularity of their blogs even more than visitor stats and page impressions so Feedburner not working is bad news. Unfortunately Feedburner hasn’t been giving any information about these problems. The last post on the Feedburner blog is from November 04, 2007. There is some discussion going on in the Feedburner forums about the inflated numbers though.
Feedblitz announced that their problems will most likely be fixed by Wednesday for most people and my guess is that Feedburner will start working again then too. Still, in this age of transparency it is strange that Feedburner hasn’t been communicating more. It seems that these problems started over the weekend so they have had plenty of time to report something.
UPDATE: a few minutes after I posted this story the Feedburner counter here updated for the first time in 48 hours. The Feedburner admin panel still shows old data. Seems like Feedburner is back up and updating incrementally.
UPDATE II: about an hour later the Feedburner site has been updated too. Everything seems to be back to normal. No official announcements yet.
Written on 4th June 2009
11 COMMENTS 
We’ll keep you updated, but for now, here are a few alternative video sites that are bound to keep you entertained (but that you should also checked out a long time ago)
There are numerous reports floating round the Twittersphere and blogosphere of various Google sites either not loading at all or loading very slowly.
Written on 11th August 2008
Yesterday we reported that 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
