In case you don’t get the reference, Weebles are roly-poly toys shaped like eggs with a weight at the bottom end, so they wobble when pushed, but never fall completely over. Hence the slogan “weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.” Well this week, a few big sites wobbled, but they were’nt down, at least not for long.
The Wikipedia site went down on Wednesday night, March 24th. Dedicated Server News reported that a DNS failure notification greeted users visiting Wikipedia, but the reason for the outage going down was unclear. Wikipedia used Twitter to notify people and direct them to a blog post explaining the technical problem, but that link also returned a DNS failure.
It was hinted that a server cooling issue may be to blame for the site going down, but it was up and running after just a short while. Other websites have also been affected by servers overheating which included Last.fm’s London server last May.
Then early Thursday the 25th, YouTube was down for almost two full hours. Visitors to the homepage were greeted with an error message that simply read “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” or a 500 Internal Server Error message. TechCrunch reported that fortunately, videos still played on sites where they were embedded, and if you headed directly to dedicated video URLs you were able to watch them without a hitch.
In the meantime, there was so much chatter about it on Twitter that the words ‘Service Unavailable’ actually graduated to a Trending topic, with internet speed.
Nothing has appeared yet on their blog to explain the downtime, but YouTube posted the following on Twitter:
YouTube experienced a technical issue this morning. Our engineers worked to fix it and the site is back to normal. Apologies to our users.
Tags: Internet Speed, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube