Skip to main content

Top 13 Website Crashes of 2010?

I was doing a bit of research for an article and I started compiling a list of high-profile website crashes in 2010.
Pingdom have published a list here - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/major_internet_incidents_and_outages_of_2010.php as have Alertsite here - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/29/the-biggest-web-outages-o_n_801943.html
But I decided to compile my own list from a more UK-centric perspective and came up with my “baker’s dozen” below.
# Site Date News Link
1 National Rail Jan-10 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/rail_chaos/
2 Outnet Apr-10 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/blog/2010/apr/16/outnet-sale-website-crash
3 Apple (iPhone 4 Launch) Jun-10 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1286756/Apple-iPhone-4-pre-order-Website-crashes-new-iPhone-goes-sale.html
4 ITV.com (World Cup Video) Jun-10 http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/top-stories/473033/itv-player-problems-cause-world-cup-frustration
5 HMV  Jul-10 http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/top-stories/492844/hmv-music-download-site-crashes
6 France.fr Aug-10 http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/296137
7 Facebook Sep-10 http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/11403897
8 UK Ticket websites (Take That Tickets) Oct-10 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11650620
9 Mastercard (Wikileaks) Dec-10 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8189007/WikiLeaks-hackers-crash-Mastercard-site-with-cyber-attack.html
10 PayPal (Wikileaks) Dec-10 http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-management/2010/12/06/paypal-hit-by-ddos-attack-after-spurning-wikileaks-40091063/
11 Tesco Clubcard Dec-10 http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/shopping/2010/12/anger-as-tesco-website-crashes-on-clubcard-deadline-day
12 BA.com Dec-10 http://www.cio.co.uk/news/3254329/ba-website-down-amid-snow-chaos
13 Twitter (Fail Whale) Multiple http://status.twitter.com/
If you review the related articles the #fails seem to fall into 4 major categories
(1) Underestimating demand on launch e.g. HMV or France.fr. This could be either a marketing #fail (by grossly underestimating the traffic) or a tech #fail by just not building a site that could handle the expected traffic.  Maybe they should have read my whitepaper before launching “55 Killer questions before you launch your new website
(2) Demand surge exceeding capacity & scalability – e.g. ticket sites, Apple, Tesco Clubcard, BA.com, Outnet, National Rail. Perhaps they should read this post “Dealing with Traffic Spikes
(3) “Enemy Action” – DDoS attacks or other hacking activity e.g. PayPal & Mastercard re Wikileaks “Hacktivism”.
(4) Poor capacity planning – just not scaling fast enough e.g. Twitter’s repeated failures under load.
How did you site cope in 2010 – did you fall into either of these 4 categories?
Are there any more we can add to the list?
Feedback in the comments section please!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Your link is accidentally appended to your Site Confidence webmail.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/major_internet_incidents_and_outages_of_2010.php
The Ops Mgr said…
Whoooppss! So much for my blog editorial checking process! Fixed now.

Popular posts from this blog

So what else does Operations do? Well, there is a whole organisation run by the UK govermnent to help answer that question! ITIL , or the IT Infrastructure Library, is a library of best practice information that basically tells you everything you need to do to run an IT department. Similarly developers have development methodologies such as RAD, JAD, Agile/XP, and Project Managers have PM methodologies such as Prince 2, PMBok etc to cover off their areas in more specific detail. ITIL breaks it down into 7 key areas: Service Support - deals with the actual provision of IT services such as the service (help) desk, incident management, problem management, release management etc Service Delivery - deals with ensuring that you can continue to DELIVER the service support functions with things like contigency planning, capacity management, service levels etc The Business Perspective - helps to ensure that the IT function is aligned with the organisation's business strategy and that how to...

Using Gmail aliases to create multiple test email accounts for QA

Came across this today when someone wanted to know how to create multiple email test accounts without involving their IT department (don’t ask!) or managing multiple free email accounts. Gmail allows you to create aliases for your email address automatically. For example, if your Gmail account is joe.bloggs@gmail.com then joe.bloggs+test.case01@gmail.com will work for your account – anything after the “+” sign can be used to create an alias.  These emails will be delivered to your normal Gmail inbox. So when you are testing you can use +test.case01, +test.case02, +test.case03 and so on as your test email addresses (assuming that your application doesn’t get upset at the use of the “+” in an email address. It shouldn’t, its a valid character in the RFC http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696#page-5 ) So lets say you want to filter these test emails and label so they don’t get lost in your Inbox. Easy, just use a Gmail filter and search for a whatever common “stem” you used ...