That’s right, Twitter went down today due to DDoS attacks. Old news. I’m writing, however, about how people responded to this bit of fail.

A few hours of Twitter outage, and apparently, people had stompy fits, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the last blackberry outage. See, there were rumors out there, that there existed these hives of Starbucks-dwelling hermits who spent all of their time huddled around laptops and netbooks or incessantly fondling the touchscreens of their cell phones, and their only interaction with the outside world happens to be Twitter. And if ever it were to go down… OH NO! they just wouldn’t survive the day and would be incapable of coping with the real world again.

Just rumors, I thought. Total exaggeration. No one would be that stupid, that facetious, that fad-obsessed, that an actual social life would be nonexistent in the face of the almighty Twitter.

Apparently, and as a testament to the truly sad state this humanity has degenerated to, I was so wrong:

For Twitter users, the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down.

“I had to Google search Twitter to find out what was going on, when normally my Twitter feed gives me all the breaking news I need,” said Alison Koski, a New York public-relations manager. She added she felt “completely lost” without Twitter.

Oh heavens, she had to actually Google something to find out about something? The utter indignity! How did she survive such a harrowing ordeal! I mean to think for a few hours, she had to look away from her cell phone to find out what’s going on in the world! WHAT HORROR!
Read the rest of this entry »

So, Gmail had a little oopsie early this morning, and was down for about 2 and a half hours. Despite the obligatory mea culpa (which actually sounds sincere, kinda), this has caused a bunch of businesses and hipsters the world over to have coniption fits.

The freak-outs included Creepy McClatchen here, who felt he could deliver the news oh-so-well via CNN’s troll-central, iReport:

Apparently, major businesses and corporations are relying on Gmail for their super-important business dealings and commerce-level communications. This even though the service is still in beta, which generally implies a certain level of non-reliability and uncertainty. I guess “in this economy” (A phrase I despise, and will write about later), the IT departments of major business concerns – assuming they still have IT departments to speak of – feel it’s worth it to cut costs and rely on Google to provide E-mail and Application support. Who knew?

Even silly little blogs and mom and pop companies I know of and have offered advice to rely on much more reliable services to provide their e-mail. Yes, they cost some money, but not that much. Especially considering the bogus “lost productivity” figures some people are caulating as a result of this two hour glitch. It seems that “in this economy,” the vogue these days is for people to calculate wildly outrageous monetary figures and apply them as losses, as if anyone will give a damn. Hey, if the government can do it, why can’t we, right? Case in point: this little righteous missive…

“Let’s count the cost: 25m users, 33% affected; average of $50 per hour lost productivity = $415m per hour economic cost…”

… and this will increase to full 113 million users as USA starts its’ day…… so looking at $2 billion per hour.

You know, I’m an important guy where I work, but if my e-mail were to go down for a couple hours, it wouldn’t cost the company I work for $100. Fact is, being as knowledgeable as I am, I have backup methods of communicating. Like, my cell phone for instance. Or another e-mail service. Or, maybe, just maybe I’d take a break from my e-mail and do actual work during a such an outage. What a novel idea for these hard economic times!

So, relax people. Having to take an extended coffee break because you can’t pretend to look busy poring over your spam isn’t going to collapse the economy any further. Really, it isn’t. And if it really caused you such horrid economic distress, maybe you can hit Google up for a refund of the money you paid in. That’ll stick it to The Man, won’t it?

Or, maybe you could stop relying on a Beta service, if your e-mail is really that life-and-death. There are plenty of pay e-mail services out there who’d love to have your business and can promise you some real uptime metrics and top reliability. But if you won’t pay for the performance, then you should quit your whining. Put up or shut up!