The carrier noted its overall 99 percent uptime, and characterized the outages as the growing pains that come with the territory as it pioneers a new 4G LTE network.

Each of the outages, Verizon said, had distinct causes.

Here’s the full release:

Statement From Verizon Wireless on 4GLTE Network

12/29/2011

In light of recent events, Verizon Wireless shared the following statement about its 4GLTE Network:

The Verizon Wireless 4GLTE Network is BY FAR the largest and the most advanced 4GLTE wireless network in the world. It is available in 190 US markets and covers more than 200 million people, providing the fastest 4G Network in the US.

Being a pioneer comes with growing pains. The recent issues that affected our customers’ 4GLTE service were unforeseen despite careful, diligent planning, deployment and ongoing upgrade programs.

Problems customers experienced affected connectivity to the 4GLTE Network and data service. Several times, we have proactively “moved” 4GLTE customers onto our 3G Network to ensure all would have a data connection. For brief periods, such as on Wednesday (12/28), 4GLTE customers could not connect to the 3G Network as quickly as we would have liked.

Nonetheless, we estimate that 4GLTE connectivity has been available approximately 99 percent of the time this year.

Why have these issues occurred with our 4GLTE Network? Each incident has been different from a technical standpoint. Our engineers have successfully diagnosed those past triggering events, and they have not re-occurred. We also work diligently to rectify technical problems in the Network before they affect any customers.

Our 3G and 1X Networks continue to reliably process calls, texts and data for customers with 3G devices and, when necessary, 4GLTE devices. It continues to perform at the high level that established it as the nation’s largest and most reliable 3G Network.

We are taking a number of steps, working closely with our network suppliers, to ensure the integrity of our 4GLTE Network. We continue to fortify and improve its performance, and our goal is that our 4GLTE Network meets the same high standards that our 3G Network has set for performance and reliability.

Among the numerous measures we have taken or will take are: geographic segmentation, which enables us to isolate, contain and rectify network performance issues, and maintain service to the majority of customers when an issue does develop; and software fixes that we have developed, tested and applied regularly – and will continue to do so. Both will improve performance and reliability.

And finally, we are learning from these issues and applying the same gold standard to our 4GLTE Network that make our 3G Network the nation’s largest and most reliable.

Verizon Wireless is a leader and pioneer in this cutting edge technology that provides very fast wireless data speeds, enabling customers to enjoy the best experience in video and other wireless data usage. Clear unbuffered streaming video, super fast file downloads and wide availability are among the advantages we offer to customers. The capabilities of 4GLTE have exceeded many expectations.

We will not rest until our 4GLTE network performs at the very highest levels that our customers have come to expect from us.

However, that’s a significant improvement from 2010. Tumblr had more downtime in two months in 2010 than in the first 11 months of 2011, Pingdom said. This year the longest Tumblr outage was three hours, compared to almost 24 hours last year.

To be fair, that unreliability probably stems from Tumblr’s quick growth. It now has 37 million blogs, up from 11 million a year ago.

Meanwhile, Pingdom’s measurements found that Blogger was by far the most reliable blog host. It had uptime of 99.998 percent in 2011, which Pingdom gushed was “highly impressive” and way better than might be expected for such a large Web site.

That strikes me as off, given that Blogger had an outage of more than 20 hours in May, which it attributed to data corruption. I’ve asked Pingdom for clarification.

Pingdom said TypePad and WordPress also had more than 99.9 percent uptime this year, while Posterous was just under that.

The promise comes in a blog entry posted by Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise. “Unlike most providers, we don’t plan for our users to be down, even when we’re upgrading our services or maintaining our systems,” writes Glotzbach. From now on, all downtime that does occur will be counted and applied toward the customer’s service level agreement. In fact, the entire section of its SLA that covers scheduled downtime is being removed. This includes periods of 10 minutes or less, which under the terms of its old agreement didn’t count as downtime.

Google also released some data about the availability of Gmail, both the consumer and enterprise versions. It says that in 2010 it managed to maintain uptime 99.984 percent of the time. This, Glotzbach says, works out to about seven minutes of downtime per month. Citing data from the Radicati Group, he says that makes Gmail 32 times more reliable than the average on-premise email system and 46 times more reliable than Microsoft Exchange.

Over the years, Google Apps has taken some criticism for downtime issues and for not meeting the level of availability spelled out in its agreement. Shortly after it introduced its premier version in 2007, there were reports of availability problems. And there have been occasional Gmail outages like this one in 2009. As services we use daily migrate to the cloud, downtime seems an unavoidable by-product, as this list of incidents in 2010 from Data Center Knowledge suggests. It may seem like a small thing, but Google is making a strong statement here. It will be interesting to see if any of the other cloud providers respond in kind.

The world of Facebook did not stop last Friday–although its unusual downtime was kind of spooky–when “The Social Network” made its debut in New York.

The much-anticipated movie opens wide this Friday for all to see what the hubbub is about.

And for everyone in Silicon Valley to debate, of course, grokking the film that looks askance at the origins of the powerful social networking site and especially its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

BoomTown will be doing so on Friday after a 2 pm screening sponsored by Eastwick Communications, which will be followed by a panel discussion titled: “Trust, Privacy, and Ethics in the Facebook Age.”

Panelists include M. Ryan Calo, director of the Consumer Privacy Project at Stanford Law School; Matt Cohler, one of Facebook’s earliest execs (where he remains a special advisor) and now a VC at Benchmark Capital; FutureWorks’ Brian Solis; and ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik.

It sounds very lofty, but I plan to be hopped up on Red Vines and Jujubes–so please send some suggestions for questions to ask the panel to @karaswisher on Twitter.

Until then, I leave you with this terrific picture below of Zuckerberg and Newark Mayor Cory Booker at a KIPP school there that was posted by Solis.

Frankly, I don’t give a fig about whether the timing of his $100 million donation to help reform education was or was not to burnish his image, after seeing the promise on the faces of these kids.

It is hopefully one of many more to come from the vast wealth Zuckerberg will have after Facebook goes public.

In fact, I’d like to know what the Winklevii did with their $65 million payout, other than flap their lantern jaws about how they needed more dough for creating exactly nothing.

Zuckerberg might deserve a lot of smacking around for serious issues related to how he runs Facebook now and in the future–and he surely is about to get a truckload related to the founding of the company.

But for the donation alone, let’s all try to drop our deep cynicism for just one moment–even as we all enjoy a movie at his expense too.

That info comes at the bottom of a new blog post the service put up explaining its downtime problems this past week. If you’re technically savvy, it might be meaningful for you. (My caveman translation attempt: Twitter say internal network bad. Twitter sorry. Twitter fix.)

But this is the part you’ll want to think about if you’re planning on tweeting about Wayne Rooney’s temper tomorrow:

As more people turn to Twitter to see what’s happening in the world (or in the World Cup), you may still see the whale when there are unprecedented spikes in traffic. For instance, during the World Cup tournament–and particularly during big, closely-watched matches (such as tomorrow’s match between England and the U.S.A.)–we anticipate a significant surge in activity on Twitter. While we are making every effort to prepare for that surge, the whale may surface.

As Twitter notes, the fail whale shows up much less frequently than it used to. And the World Cup is a really, really big deal. So your inclination should probably be to cut the service some slack–and you certainly can’t demand a refund.

But if it breaks down at a particularly crucial time, you’re still going to want to give Twitter a red card. Or worse.

Two years ago we decided to move our servers to 365 Main because we believed its San Francisco facility could accommodate our expected growth better than any other, and for a comparable price. And that’s exactly what has happened. 365 Main has fulfilled its brand promise of [the] ‘world’s finest data centers’ by delivering the reliability and uptime that attracted us in the first place.”

–Dale Emel, director of technology services at RedEnvelope

Well, 365 Main couldn’t have picked a worse day to celebrate its uptime record, now could it. Yesterday morning the data center operator broadcast a press release announcing that it had provided online retailer RedEnvelope with two years of 100% uptime. “To ensure uptime for key tenants such as RedEnvelope, 365 Main provides modern power and cooling infrastructure,” 365 said in the release. “The company’s San Francisco facility includes two complete backup systems for electrical power to protect against a power loss. In the unlikely event of a cut to a primary power feed, the state-of-the-art electrical system instantly switches to live backup generators, avoiding costly downtime for tenants and keeping the data center continuously running.”

Quite a boast. And one that was made absurdly ironic a few hours later when a power outage in downtown San Francisco interrupted 365′s theoretically uninterruptible power supplies and disabled RedEnvelope and a host of other Web sites.

The outage, which began at about 2 p.m. PDT, knocked a who’s-who of Web 2.0 outfits offline for a good hour or so. How is that a company that touts itself as the operator of “the world’s finest data centers” failed its clients so miserably? Said Miles Kelly, 365 Main’s vice president of marketing, “I don’t know.”

Truly an unfortunate turn of events for 365 and one sure to give its PR team nightmares for years to come.