It’s going to be a long wait for the NBN, and even if that eventually makes the Internet faster, there’s still going to be the odd occasion when you can’t get connected We’ve got suggestions for the best uses of time when a disconnection happens.
Telstra-owned BigPond is Australia’s largest ISP, which means that its glitches tend to affect more people than anyone else. Suzanne Tindal at ZDNet reports that a number of NSW and Victorian customers were left without access to email and other services over the weekend, though Telstra claims those services were due to be restored by Monday evening. Have you been hit by the outage? Is it still a problem? Share your experience in the comments.
Telstra fights with BigPond glitch [ZDNet]The BBC reports that Gmail went down before 6:30am EST for “a small subset of users,” less than two weeks after the service’s 2.5-hour downtime. Having login problems, or otherwise irked? Tell us in the comments. (Lifehacker AU is obviously not surprised.)
According to the BBC, the Official Google Blog, and a handful of upset tipsters, Gmail went offline for roughly two and a half hours yesterday —with some users reporting up to four hours of downtime. I’m not sure if the alternate options for accessing Gmail when it’s down worked for anyone, but if you’re rocking the new Offline Gmail, you probably felt pretty smart. Did you suffer the brunt of a down Gmail? Feeling angry at the big G? Vent and commiserate in the comments. [Official Google Blog, BBC]
Last week’s heatwave was clearly bad news for residents of Melbourne, Adelaide and everywhere in between, but it also turned out to be bad news for Internet users over a much wider area. Dan Warne at APC reports that a power outage in Primus’ Melbourne data centre affected service from several ISPS relying on the PIPE Internet exchange, with potentially hundreds of thousands of customers being affected. Did you have a heatwave net outage? Share your survival tactics in the comments.
Melbourne blackout cripples Internet nationallyPayPal Australia is scheduled to have a maintenance outage on June 11 between 4pm and 5pm. There’s nothing very unusual about that, but if the ACCC allows eBay to go ahead with its plan to make PayPal compulsory from June 17, the decision will effectively double the number of outages eBay sellers and buyers will have to put up with. As far as we can tell, a PayPal outage shouldn’t bring eBay to its knees — you can list PayPal as a selling option even if you can’t process a payment, so all it really does is delay sending and receiving payments.But given that eBay outages already tend to occur during normal Australian working hours (since they’re scheduled for the convenience of the US), we’d hope PayPal outages could be similarly adjusted in Australia’s favour. After all, we’re the nation acting as guinea pigs for this scheme. Is that asking too much? (Footnote: eBay PR contacted me after this story went up, keen to emphasise that site-wide maintenance outages for eBay now pretty much never happen. But there’s still regular maintenance on elements of the site, and PayPal does suffer from site-wide maintenance periods, so the overall problem gets bigger however you dice it.)
If your Blackberry suddenly stopped buzzing today it’s not because the boss stopped CC’ing you on every memo you never need to see—service has been out for over four hours now and counting for some users. No word on when it’ll be restored.
