Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Facebook outage continues in Ottawa

by alec on July 31, 2007

A few minutes ago I sent Ottawa CTV Reporter Paul Brent home empty handed.  Paul and his camera man showed up at my house to do a piece on Facebook, and how it's making the crossover from social to business networking.  We were going to shoot some footage, and he was going to chat with my sons and me about Facebook.  But instead of being able to log in, this is what we got to see:

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Back at the CTV studios, apparently they were able to access Facebook. I understand that Scoble and a few others in the valley are back up also.  But here in the Canadian hinterlands of Manotick, Facebook is a definite no-show, and has been for most of the last 14 hours.  Growing pains? Seems doubtful, given how long it has taken them to resolve the issue. 

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Lights out at Facebook

by alec on July 31, 2007

We might be looking at the first big Facebook outage folks. Today, at various times, the front page of Facebook has displayed:

  • Your account is temporarily unavailable (7:00 AM EDT today).
  • Facebook is upgrading.
  • Facebook is temporarily unavailable.  We're working on it…

And a few minutes ago DNS wouldn't resolve the site name altogether. 

TechCrunch picked up on it at 10 PDT, but perhaps more interesting is this assertion that Facebook may been hacked.  One thing is certain… you don't take your site offline in the middle of the day to do server upgrades.  Whatever the reason — hacked, failed upgrade, dead servers — the tension must be excruciating in downtown Palo Alto at the moment. 

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Vringo scoops up $12 million

July 31, 2007

This morning Vringo announced that they've scored $12 million in series B investment from Warburg Pincus.  I've personally been skeptical of video ringtones.  It seemed a bit like screen savers for the PC — popular but easily duplicated.  Clearly Jon Medved and his team are executing, raising money, proving me wrong and that the old [...]

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SwitchVox 3, now with CRM support

July 31, 2007

SwitchVox yesterday announced that SwitchVox 3 contains support for leading CRM systems like SugarCRM and Salesforce.com.  On incoming calls, users will see pop-ups with information from these systems, along with information from Google Maps which tells you where the call is coming from. Although integration with CRM providers is the news piece of this release, [...]

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The impact of Google and Apple on wireless markets

July 31, 2007

War for the Wireless World is a lengthy article published in yesterdays Financial Post on the impact of Apple and Google's newest wireless plays — Apple with iPhone, and Google with their declaration that they wish to participate in the 700Mhz spectrum auction.  A couple of choice quotes: With demand for the iPhone bordering on rabid, Apple is daring to [...]

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Slow news

July 31, 2007

It must be summer.  These are slow news days, while everyone heads out to the beaches and cottages.  For instance, this morning: The Register reports half of all European calls will be mobile in 2008. They're raising the alarm for fixed-line carriers. Not exactly surprising, that. Microsoft will release Works 9.0 as ad-funded software. Finally. How long has the [...]

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