Hasta La Gadget!

Has an evening with National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation become an annual holiday tradition? Or perhaps you enjoy a pre-present thrill, courtesy of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Whatever the flick, there’s a good chance you won’t be watching it on Netflix Instant Streaming tonight, reportedly due to an outage over at Amazon Web Services. Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockroft is on the case, explaining on Twitter that the interruption will affect only certain devices — while we’re not quite sure which gadgets are currently down, we have received reports that gaming consoles and connected TVs have gone offline. Netflix, for its part, has also taken to Twitter to apologize for the outage, suggesting that you follow the as-yet-silent @Netflixhelps account for updates.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Update: As of 11:45AM ET on 12/25, nearly 20 hours after Netflix began tweeting about a service interruption, the company has confirmed that streaming has been restored.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD

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Via: Gigaom

Source: Netflix (Twitter), Adrian Cockroft (Twitter)

As eagerly as Google has gone through routing acrobatics to minimize the Chinese government’s ability to censor and spy on its its services, it’s still at the mercy of the Great Firewall. The company might have just run head-first into the bricks as of Friday. As confirmed by some of our own staff, all of Google’s services stopped working in China for at least the better part of a day despite the search firm verifying that everything was in good working order. Officials haven’t confirmed that anything was afoot, but it’s easy to raise the specter of possible censorship given local political maneuvering. The once-a-decade Communist Party Congress began on Thursday, and the establishment may have wanted to cut off a relatively unfiltered line of communication for dissidents during a transition of power. We’re hearing that access may have ameliorated in at least parts of the country, which would be a pleasant surprise — not that a sudden improvement in service will cheer up those who know they still face a backlog.

Update: As SlashGear notes, Computerworld / IDG has reported that Google’s services were up and running in country again after about 12 hours of being inaccessible. Official details on the blocking are still slim as ever (and will likely remain as such) about the happenings, but you can click through the links above for more in the meantime.

Filed under: Networking, Internet, Google

Google services grind to a halt in China, political transition suspected as the culprit (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 10 Nov 2012 00:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When cell phone service goes down, the whole world goes haywire. Today, Sprint’s often-spotty service went totally down in the Pacific Northwest, and as a result Sprint subscribers in Portland and Seattle can’t make calls. That’s not all, though. Alaska Airlines is also reporting that the outage also affects thier internal systems, so they can’t check passengers in. They’ve had to delay flights. Sprint’s official word is that it’s a fiber cut:

Due to a fiber cut in the Pacific northwest, you may have issues making or receiving calls, or accessing data services if you are in the Minnesota, Washington, or Oregon areas. The issue has been identified and crews are working diligently to correct the problem. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Are you experiencing issues with Sprint cell phone service?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Nationwide texting outage for Sprint subscribers?, Ditch your random phone number for a easy to remember **HANDLE,

While the two events are entirely unrelated, a major service outage coinciding with potentially the biggest mobile of the year hitting stores worldwide is just plain old unlucky. Users of RIM’s BlackBerry service in the EMEA region are at the wrong end of a network problem affecting BBM, email and internet. At the moment it doesn’t appear to be of the vast and crippling scale as last time, but small consolation if you’re one of the unlucky ones. RIM has acknowledged the issue, and you can bet the farm on the fact there is more than a handful of slightly stressed engineers on the case, hoping to keep customers from making that impulse purchase. Let us know in the comments if you’re affected.

Update: We’ve just received this official statement from RIM in the UK:

“Our apologies to any customers impacted by the BlackBerry service issue today. We can confirm that services have been restored and are now operating normally.”

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

BlackBerry outage affecting users in Europe, Middle East and Africa (update: service restored?) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Sep 2012 06:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to domain registrar Go Daddy, things are back to normal after yesterday’s massive outage. The company noted that service outages started at around 1PM ET, with service being “fully restored” by 7PM. Contrary to claims of an attack from hackers, the company’s interim CEO Scott Wagner insists that the outage “was not a ‘hack’ and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS).” Instead, Go Daddy is chalking the problem up to “a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables,” adding that the company has taken steps to avoid a repeat of the problem. According to Wagner, data was never at risk during yesterday’s issue.

Filed under: Internet

Go Daddy: yesterday’s outage resolved, ‘was not a hack’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Sep 2012 12:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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