SAN FRANCISCO – Internet engineer Alex Payne has devised a way to answer a commonly asked question of the digital age: Is my favorite Web site working today?
In March, Payne, 24, created downforeveryoneorjustme.com, as in, “Down for everyone, or just me?” It lets visitors type in a Web address and see if a site is generally inaccessible or if the problem is with their connection.
“I had seen that question posed so often,” said Payne, who perhaps not coincidentally works at Twitter, a San Francisco-based Web-messaging and social-networking site itself known for frequent downtime. “Technology companies have branded the Internet as a place that is always on and where information is always available. People are disappointed and looking for answers when it turns out not to be true.”
There is plenty of disappointment to go around these days. Such technology stalwarts as Yahoo, Amazon.com and Research in Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, have suffered embarrassing technical problems in the past few months.
About a month ago, a sudden surge of visitors to Payne's site began asking about the normally impervious Amazon. That site was down for several hours over two business days, and Amazon, by some estimates, lost more than $1 million an hour in sales.
The Web, like any technology or medium, always has been susceptible to unforeseen hiccups. Particularly in the early days of the Web, sites such as eBay and Schwab.com regularly went dark.
Because fewer people used the Internet then, the stakes were much lower. Today, the Web is an irreplaceable part of daily life, and Internet companies have plans to make people more dependent on it.
Companies such as Google want people to store not just e-mail online but also spreadsheets, photo albums, sales data, and nearly every other piece of personal and professional information. That data is supposed to be more accessible than information tucked away in the office computer or filing cabinet.
The problem is that this ideal requires Web services to be available around the clock – and even the Internet's biggest companies sometimes have trouble making that happen.
Last holiday season, Yahoo's system for Internet retailers, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, went dark for 14 hours, taking down thousands of e-commerce companies on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. In February, certain Amazon services that power the sites of many Web startup companies had a day of intermittent failures, knocking many of those companies offline.
The causes of these problems range widely: It might be system upgrades with unintended consequences, human error (oops, wrong button) or old-fashioned electrical failures. Last month, an electrical explosion in a Houston data center of the Planet, a Web hosting company, knocked thousands of Web businesses off the Internet for up to five days.
“It was prolonged torture,” said Grant Burhans, a Web entrepreneur from Florida whose telecommunications-and real-estate-related Web sites were down for four days, costing him thousands of dollars in lost business.
Web addicts who find themselves shut out of their favorite Web sites tend to fill blogs and online bulletin boards with angry invective about broken promises and interrupted routines.
Jesse Robbins, a former Amazon executive who was responsible for keeping Amazon online from 2004 to 2006, said the outcries over failures are understandable.
“When these sites go away, it's a sudden loss. It's like you are standing in the middle of Macy's and the power goes out,” Robbins said. “When the thing you depend on to live your daily life suddenly goes away, it's trauma.”
He said Web services should be held to the same standard of reliability as the older services they aim to replace.
“These companies have a responsibility to people who rely and depend on them, just as people going over a public bridge expect that the bridge won't suddenly collapse,” Robbins said.
By some measures, despite the high-profile failures, the Internet is performing better than ever.
“There are millions of Web sites and billions of Web pages around the world,” said Umang Gupta, chief executive of Keynote Systems, which monitors companies' Web performance. “These big high-visibility problems are actually very rare.”
