Staffers at the company, which operates the Chicago Board Options Exchange, were confident they could fix the issues, CBOE executives have told colleagues and others outside the company. One area of focus by CBOE Thursday and Friday has been whether the exchange should have moved to a backup system to be safe, the people briefed on the discussions said.

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Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the company’s status blog had not been updated as of 7:04 am PT. Multiple reports of the outage circulated widely, however — via Twitter.

Twitter seems to have temporarily remedied the outage by swapping out its own link-shortening service — which looks to be the problem here — with bit.ly, another link-shortening service. Links accessed through the bit.ly shortener via Twitter were indeed accessible.

It’s obviously a pain for users wanting to access links via the service, which remains one of the most popular ways to discover news and websites through viral circulation and distribution. But it’s likely more of a pain for publishers and news media outlets (like ours, for example) looking to push out stories using the service.

It’s also an unfortunate reminder of the “fail whale” days of yore, when Twitter’s service was far less reliable and experienced downtime often.

The good news: No more fail whale. Now we’ve got a robot monkey instead.

Update 7:34 am PT: And we’re back! Twitter issued a statement via its engineering status blog, saying the issue has been resolved. Carry on.

In my own tests, sometimes the page would load, and other times I would simply get a “service unavailable” error.

Update: An Amazon spokesperson provided the following statement: “The gateway page of Amazon.com was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes. Other pages of the site were accessible and AWS was not impacted.” Sources close to the situation said the issues were internal and that the site was not hacked.

A homepage outage is truly very rare for the e-commerce giant.

A decade ago, when Amazon was less reliable, analysts would estimate how much the company was losing every second, or every minute. Now that the company’s sales total $61 billion a year, it must be even more significant.

Interesting to note that Amazon’s cloud is fully operational, according to Amazon’s status page.

Over the past year, there have been several instances where Amazon’s customers, such as Netflix and Instagram, have gone down due to Amazon server outages. This time, the problems seem to be restricted to Amazon’s own services, which either means the homepage operates on different servers, or it’s experiencing another problem entirely.

In case you desperately need to shop, get on your phone. The Verge is reporting that the outages are not affecting the company’s mobile applications.

Netflix said Monday that its DVD Web site has been suffering outages, and users have been reporting sporadic availability.

“We are experiencing some technical difficulty with the Netflix DVD Web site, which as a result may not be available for all members. Our engineers are working to address this issue,” Netflix said in a statement, adding that streaming has not been affected.

While details of this latest disruption are slim, responsibility for it does seem to rest squarely with Netflix. That wasn’t the case with the Dec. 24 outage, which was caused by a failure with Amazon’s Web Services.

Millions of Netflix customers from Canada to Brazil were unable to stream video on Christmas Eve after technical issues in Amazon’s servers in Northern Virginia felled service from Dec. 24 through the following morning. Netflix said the outage lasted nearly half a day for some of its users, and stemmed from problems with Amazon’s Web Services unit, or AWS, which manages online operations for many companies.

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Visitors to the company’s Web site on Tuesday and Wednesday were greeted with a generic Web page for domain registrar Network Solutions, saying the address needed to be renewed. FreshDirect directed customers to call its service line, and a representative said the company hoped to get its Web site back up later Wednesday.

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“Netflix is down for some customers this Christmas Eve, thanks to an outage of some of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure,” the company said on its Twitter account.

A Netflix spokesman added that the outage stretched “across the Americas.”

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According to a BBC report, the capital city, Damascus, had Internet service as of Saturday.

Internet monitoring service Renesys also confirmed a number of the country’s Internet service providers are back up and running.

“Renesys confirms a largely complete restoration of the Syrian Internet this morning,” Renesys said in a blog post. “Internet service (is) being provided post-restoration by Telecom Italia, Tata Communications, Turk Telecom, and PCCW.”

However, CloudFlare cautioned the restoration of service doesn’t necessarily mean all is well.

“While the network is back online, it’s impossible to know if filtering or
monitoring technologies were installed during the outage,” CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince said in a statement.

As was the case in Egypt during earlier uprisings, the Syrian outage would seem to be the work of the ruling government aiming to thwart rebel communications.

The outage has again raised concerns for the region and other nations about just how vulnerable they could be to having their key communications cut in a time of political instability.

In a brief statement, RIM said it is “currently experiencing a BlackBerry service issue impacting some users in Europe, Middle East & Africa.”

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A statement posted online by interim CEO Scott Wagner, said the service outage “was not caused by external influences. It was not a ‘hack’ and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS).”

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“T-Mobile experienced a network data issue Monday night that affected service for some customers with a 3G or 4G device,” the company said in a statement to AllThingsD. “Some customers were not able to initiate a data session, or experienced intermittent data connectivity.”

The wireless carrier said the issue has been solved, but didn’t identify the problem.

“T-Mobile’s data service has been fully restored,” the company said. “Rapid response engineering teams identified and resolved the issue. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

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.

Users in Alabama, California and Indiana, among other places, are taking to the company’s support Web site to document their connection woes.

The company had an outage last week and another earlier this month.

With the past outages, Verizon has confirmed the issues but declined to discuss the specific causes. A Verizon representative was not immediately available for comment on the latest outage.

Update: Verizon has provided the following comment:

We are investigating reports of some customers experiencing trouble accessing the 4GLTE network. The network itself continues to operate and all customers continue to be able to make calls, send text messages and utilize data services. 3G devices are operating normally.

Kleiner Perkins has nabbed former Twitter engineering head Mike Abbott, who left the social communications company less than two months ago to be an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital.

(Well, that didn’t last long, Mike, but maybe the food was better at 2750 Sand Hill Road than at 2480 Sand Hill Road.)

In an interview this morning, Abbott said that he hopes to stay a VC for 20 years (yipes!), since it allows him to work closely with a wide range of entrepreneurs and also get a broad view across a spectrum of businesses.

“I am really energized about what’s been happening in a lot of places like software,” he said. “From my experience, I think I bring a lot of differentiation for the companies Kleiner is invested in.”

And tech cred too. “We think engineers will be thrilled to have access to Mike and he’s a magnet for talent,” said Kleiner partner Ted Schlein, who compared him to all the comic-book heroes, The Avengers, in one person. “Mike is multi-faceted.”

Abbott was indeed a high-profile hire for Twitter a little over a year ago from Palm, where he served as head of its software and services, in charge of its webOS mobile platform.

He was brought in to provide a level of discipline and reliability to the Twitter communications platform and service, which had been plagued by persistent outages that made the Fail Whale infamous.

Abbott will focus on social, mobile and cloud investments at the well-known Silicon Valley venture firm while working on a team that includes high-profile players Mary Meeker and Bing Gordon.

Here’s the official press release:

Michael Abbott Joins Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as Partner

Engineering Leader to Help Social, Mobile and Cloud Entrepreneurs Build Teams and Ventures

MENLO PARK, Calif., December 1, 2011 – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced that Mike Abbott, former vice president of engineering at Twitter, has joined the firm as a partner on its digital team. Abbott led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft. With a deep background in social and mobile applications and infrastructure, Mike is also an expert in enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing and “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software, and advised Cloudera and Jawbone.

“I’m excited to join KPCB’s partners to build new ventures faster,” said Abbott. “The partner mix of founders, operators and investors is ideal for entrepreneurs racing to scale at this disruptive time.”

“Mike is an exceptional and well-respected leader with an outstanding track record shipping great products,” said Ted Schlein, partner, KPCB. “Mike’s deep expertise from Palm and Twitter will help social, mobile and cloud entrepreneurs win.”

Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, said, “Mike is a huge engineering talent and will be a terrific asset to Kleiner’s technology companies. He was instrumental in helping us scale Twitter’s architecture to support incredible growth ̶ from 100 million daily Tweets in January 2011 to about 250 million daily tweets today.”

In less than a year and a half, Abbott grew the Twitter engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers in an intensely competitive recruiting market. Abbott’s team rebuilt and solidified Twitter’s infrastructure. Prior to joining Twitter in 2010, Abbott led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Abbott was previously the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. Prior to that, he co-founded Passenger Inc. and founded Composite Software. Abbott has advised and invested in numerous software companies such as Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Saynow and Jawbone.

Mike Abbott is just the third senior KPCB partner added in three years, joining Bing Gordon and Mary Meeker, each with exceptional records serving mobile, social and cloud entrepreneurs. KPCB’s digital team also bolstered its infrastructure expertise with the recent addition of Ray Bradford from Amazon Web Services, where he helped grow the company’s cloud database business.

The company posted a statement on its Twitter account saying it is investigating the issue and promising a speedy update.

However, the Waterloo, Ontario, company sought to downplay concerns it could be experiencing a repeat of last month’s massive outage that crippled the company’s service globally, led to a huge stock plunge and put a huge stain on the company’s reputation for delivering rock-solid service.

“There is no system-wide outage,” RIM said in a statement to AllThingsD. “However we are investigating reports that some users in (Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa) have experienced delays.”

Update, 3:45 p.m.: RIM says service is now operating normally in that region.

Reports started cropping up around 11 am PT from users around the U.S. saying that Siri — which, to be fair, is still in beta — was unable to connect to its servers to complete searches. The problem appeared unrelated to geography or carrier, but seemed to be affecting significant numbers of users intermittently.

While I was able to compose and send a few text messages through Siri, it was unable to complete any tasks that required searching the Web for information, like answering the queries “What’s the weather like in Paris?” or “What’s Apple’s stock trading at?”

Apple has not responded to requests for comment.

One final thought: Siri’s error message in cases like these should always be “I’m sorry, I can’t do that right now, Dave” — regardless of user. What a missed opportunity for more “2001” high jinks.

“We have an unprecedented track record of reliability,” Bates told Mobile News, evidently without a hint of irony. “Our focus is on providing the best communications experience and the feedback we get from our customers is we normally deliver on that. BlackBerry is about the ultimate communications platform. There is a market for that, people see the value in it and will choose that over other platforms.”

That’s the hope, anyway. And as Bates notes, RIM’s network uptime does average about 99 percent. Not too shabby.

That said, it’s certainly possible that the duration of the latest outage will inspire businesses and consumers alike to rethink their use of the BlackBerry. The quality and reliability of the device’s email and messaging system has long been its biggest selling point. But after this outage, you’ve got to imagine it’s a bit tarnished.

Early on Monday, the company announced it would give BlackBerry users a package of free apps in an attempt to mend fences with angry customers.

In a statement, RIM said it was offering more than $100 worth of apps “as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions.”

“Our global network supports the communications needs of more than 70 million customers,” RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said in a statement. “We truly appreciate and value our relationship with our customers. We’ve worked hard to earn their trust over the past 12 years, and we’re committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future.”

The apps will be made available for download beginning on Wednesday, with more rolling out over the coming four weeks. Titles include the games Sims 3 and Bejeweled, utilities such as translation and photo editing apps, and entertainment titles like Shazam Encore and Nobex Radio Premium.

Business customers will also get one free month of technical support, RIM said.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” added Lazaridis. “We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.”

Whether these steps will be enough to hang on to the customers, though, is an open question.

According to sources close to the situation, Twitter VP of Engineering Mike Abbott has left the company.

He is apparently interested in doing more investing.

[UPDATE: Twitter confirmed the departure in a statement, noting that Abbott was joining Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur in residence. Benchmark’s Peter Fenton is on the Twitter board.

“We can confirm that Mike Abbott is no longer with Twitter. Mike will be available to assist the company in his new role as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital. We thank Mike for his leadership in growing an outstanding team of engineers from 100 to 400 that have successfully taken on the unique challenge of making Twitter reliable and stable. While Mike led the engineering team, Twitter grew from handling 55 million tweets a day to 230 million. Twitter is focused on aggressively moving forward to fulfill the profound opportunities that are in front of us.”

Said Fenton:

“What Mike Abbott accomplished at Twitter is nothing short of heroic, when Benchmark introduced him to the company we felt he had the courage and entrepreneurial drive to build a strong engineering foundation. Today we applaud him for that extraordinary accomplishment. As we continue to work closely with the team at Twitter, we’re delighted to welcome Mike to Benchmark as an entrepreneur in residence. Mike will not only continue to lend his considerable talents to supporting the team at Twitter, but as a true entrepreneur at heart, will undoubtedly be an incredible asset to our entrepreneurs and our portfolio overall.”]

The move feels sudden, but sources said it has been brewing for a while and happened several days ago.

Abbott was a high-profile hire for Twitter a little over a year ago from Palm, where he served as head of its software and services, in charge of its webOS platform.

He was brought in to bring a level of discipline and reliability to the Twitter communications platform and service, which was plagued by persistent outages that made the Fail Whale infamous.

In large part, Abbott has done that, as Twitter has grown significantly. It now has 230 million tweets per day, he said in a recent interview.

Twitter does not have a replacement as yet, sources said.