failure

Still Not Convinced the Cloud Is a Risky Place? Here Are Some Scary Numbers To Ponder.

Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on April 29, 2011 at 8:15 am PT

The company that says cloud providers are in denial about risk has estimated the total costs from the recent Epsilon data breach. Here’s a hint: They’re big.

Amazon Details Last Week's Cloud Failure, and Apologizes

Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on April 29, 2011 at 5:45 am PT

Amazon explains in detail what happened to its cloud last week, and promises it will never happen again. And it apologizes to its customers. Shaken customers will have to ask themselves if that’s enough.

Amazon's Cloud Crash Is Over, But the Talking About It Isn't

Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on April 25, 2011 at 3:45 pm PT

The big crash of Amazon’s cloud that brought down hundreds of other Internet companies that rely upon it is over. Now everyone who was affected in one way or another is comparing notes on how they coped or didn’t. And for cloud providers not named Amazon, there’s going to be an obvious business opportunity.

Amazon's Cloud Crashed Overnight, And Brought Several Other Companies Down Too

Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on April 21, 2011 at 5:17 am PT

One part of Amazon’s cloud came to a screeching halt overnight, and brought Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite, Reddit and scores of other companies down with it.

Salesforce.com Says Today's Troubles Are Fixed

Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on January 12, 2011 at 11:16 am PT

Some Salesforce customers are reporting problems accessing the service. The company says it’s working on it. Update: It’s fixed.

Skype Postmortem: Overloaded Servers and Desktop Bugs Brought Us Down

Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on December 29, 2010 at 7:56 am PT

Two problems conspired in a strange confluence of events to knock millions of users off Skype last week.

Skype's Group Video Calling Restored

Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on December 24, 2010 at 12:26 pm PT

Skype group video chat is restored, just in time for Christmas.

Skype Is Working, No Explanation Yet for What Happened

Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on December 24, 2010 at 9:22 am PT

After two days of struggling with an embarrassing pre-holiday system failure, Skype appears to be running again today. The company is offering free service to customers, but hasn’t yet explained what happened.

"They Failed": VC Fred Wilson Gets BoomTown's First Annual Someone-Had-to-Say-It Award

Kara Swisher in News on November 29, 2010 at 9:37 am PT

BoomTown has always enjoyed–although I have not always agreed with–the ruminations of Fred Wilson in his must-read blog, A VC. Today, the New York venture investor–heard of Foursquare or Twitter?–penned one that was flatly on point, simply titled”Chasing Returns” about a potential crisis in start-up funding. It’s a meme Silicon Valley might want to pay mind to.

The Long Goodbye: Xmarks Tried to Sell Twice, Before Closing Down With Class

Kara Swisher in News on September 28, 2010 at 5:15 am PT

Yesterday marked the end for Xmarks, the Mitch Kapor-backed social bookmarking start-up that was founded in 2006. What was most remarkable to BoomTown was the classiness and honesty of the goodbye, especially in Silicon Valley, which is loath to call a failure just that. Read on.