As you may have heard, yesterday web host/domain registrar GoDaddy had some serious downtime, taking tons of sites down. Much of the news coverage focused on a single hacker who tried to take credit for bringing them down. However, now that GoDaddy is back, it insists the problem was entirely internal and not the result of a hack. The company was quite explicit on that point:

The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a "hack" and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.

At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.

While my first reaction to all of this was to wonder who would still use GoDaddy, my second question is to wonder whether GoDaddy looks better or worse if it was its own fault that the service went down so broadly. Mistakes happen, but a company like GoDaddy survives on its ability not to make mistakes at that level. I guess, in the end, it's just yet another reminder of why people might want to look for alternatives.

As a bunch of folks have been sending in, the FBI raided a data center in Reston Virginia, seizing a bunch of servers and taking a bunch of sites offline (including some big names). This isn't -- as some suggested -- quite the same thing as the infamous ICE domain seizures. This sort of thing does happen from time to time, when law enforcement is seeking actual information on a server which is part of a larger criminal investigation. That said, it always amazes me how much collateral damage law enforcement does in these situations, when it seems like they could definitely be a lot more targeted. Even worse, the reports claim that the FBI is actually trying to chase down the loose hacker collective LulzSec, which seems like a waste of time. Frankly it seems like the FBI must have something more important to work on. That said, it does seem somewhat ironic that in trying to track down a group that has been taking down (somewhat random) websites, the FBI has also taken down a bunch of websites, including the popular blog network Curbed, and parts of the super popular utility Instapaper.

One of the best decisions I made when I first start blogging on Techdirt oh-so-many-years ago, was that I wouldn't blog on weekends. While it wasn't on purpose, it's worked out nicely as it gives me plenty of time on weekends to disconnect and do other stuff. I've found (surprising to some, I'm sure) that it's not at all difficult for me to pretty much ignore my computer for the weekend if I need to. And, then, there are some weekends where I do end up using the computer, either for fun or to catch up on some work-related things. However, I never considered setting up an official "schedule" of tech down time. Yet, Mark Glaser, over at MediaShift notes that a growing number of people are setting aside "tech sabbaths" to force themselves to disconnect. Interestingly, he even notes that it's often quite common for religious people, who observe a religious sabbath, to embrace this idea as well. I can see the point for folks who really have trouble disconnecting, but if it's not that big a deal, I would think that the situation should dictate how people act. If they have no pressing reason to be on the computer -- then don't use it. But that doesn't mean necessarily requiring it be out of your life for a specific time period.

While much of the focus on "uptime" today was over whether or not various web 2.0/tech sites could handle the onrush of traffic concerning the Steve Jobs/iPhone keynote, it appears that Amazon.com was actually stumbling and having trouble staying up just a few days after its still unexplained Friday meltdown. It's unclear if the two events are related, but given that Amazon is positioning itself to help keep other sites up and running, no matter what the situation, this isn't the sort of ringing endorsement it was probably looking for.

Around 10:30 am this morning, Amazon.com seemed to have disappeared from the internet, popping up a "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" message, which suggests a rather catastrophic failure. The fact that it's been doing that for about an hour now, and there still hasn't even been a "sorry we're down" type message to replace it certainly can't be a good sign. Other parts of Amazon's business do appear to be working (I was able to login to my Amazon s3 account, for example), but still, this doesn't seem like the type of Friday that Amazon was probably expecting. Update: Amusingly, Amazon is referring to this as an "unplanned event." Why, that makes it sound fun!

It took quite a while, but Skype was finally able to get its service back up and running after extended downtime last week. Monday morning, Skype posted an explanation of what happened, but it has many of us scratching our heads -- and many professionals questioning Skype and trying to match up the official explanation to reality. Skype officially blamed all the rebooting Windows computers due to Windows latest security patch. It must be nice to blame Microsoft, but it's hard to understand why that should be the problem. First of all, Microsoft security patch updates happen pretty regularly (normally once a month), often requiring the same reboot process. Why would this time suddenly be different than every time in the past? Skype doesn't explain that. Second, and much more importantly, the service crashed at 3am PT on Thursday morning. That's about 24 hours after most computers would be rebooting. Microsoft comes out with its patches on Tuesday, and most computers then do the reboot in the early hours of Wednesday morning, not Thursday morning.