RKNet Blog... Thing

Well, just as its downtime was unannounced, so too is its resurrection. Out of habit I went to shrink down a url using my URLTea bookmarklet (which I refused to dispose of until I knew for sure), lo and behold it worked! Not only did it work, it worked super fast.

What is going on in the land of URLTea? There have been no changes to the site, no updates. Nothing about the downtime on Brett Taylor’s blog. Nothing from Chris Pirillo, the instigator of the URLtea project on the outage either.

From the URLTea site, it can be inferred that this was never intended to be a total shutdown, because they claim they’ll notify users via the homepage well before an official shutdown.

What plans do you have for urlTea?

We want urlTea to be the best URL shortening service on the net. We value open source and transparency.

In the unlikely event that for some reason we can’t support urlTea, we will gladly hand over all source code, intellectual property, domain names and the urlTea database to a trusted and capable entity who will uphold the values that urlTea is being built on.

If no entity is found to pass the teapot to, we’ll give 90 days notice that we’re shutting down via the homepage.

(Bold added for emphasis.)

So what happened here? No notice of shutdown, long outage, no notable communication from the creators and operators. Then poof! They’re back? Well, I’m glad they’re back because I like the simplicity of URLtea, but can the URLtea users deal with another unexplained outage? Seems doubtful.

Got dirt on the situation? Comment!

So I came into work this morning, only to have a co-worker mention to me that AdCenter, MSN, and Hotmail all weren’t working for him. I checked a couple things and the sites loaded up just fine for me, but when I tried to log into AdCenter I got a friendly message saying that they were down for the time being.

Curiouser and curiouser. Then my first tweet of the day appeared:

trodrigues: msn servers are down. thousands of young portuguese girls commit mass suicide.

Intrigued, I decided to start tracking instances of “MSN” through Twitter IM. Boy, was that ever a mistake! The messages - most of them not in english - began pouring in, and my IM window has been blinking like mad all morning.

Some of the highlights:

(matheusodorisi): gente, o msn naum entra de forma alguma! appocalipse now!
(s1mone): @kakah o MSN morreu! Vida longa o GTalk!!!
(pvdp): Kom msn niet op.
(jonviray): MSN down for anyone else? people here at work are getting piiiissseed……
(hdur): Supongo que MSN enfurece a los dioses de Pakistán.
(Hausdorff): MSN産経のページ，なめてんのかって位重い
(justinkeller): Adium users: is MSN giving you problems today?
(jcloop): what the fruit is wrong with MSN messenger AND Hotmail??
(agenteinforma): MSN fora do ar não só no Brasil: http://tinyurl.com/3a4qyr
(jaredavery): What a nice start to my day. Had to help mum get in to Hotmail because MSN Messager did not want to work for her.
(cl0): who cares if you can’t get on msn? chances are not many people will wanna talk to you lot anyway ;)

And tons more comments like that. Lots of suggestions to try Meebo or defect to Gtalk. None of them seem to have any concrete intel on WHY MSN/Hotmail/et al are down, or if they do I don’t know enough portuguese/spanish/insert-other-languages-here to make it out.

I would like to note, that from my end, MSN messenger (using Pidgin) worked just fine, as did visiting LiveSpaces. The home page of Hotmail loaded up but I didn’t bother trying to log in.

Anybody got any good dirt on the situation?