A pair of interesting web site outages

Mon Mar 29 08:51:50 UTC 1999

Uncle..... I said it was just slightly interesting.  I don't intend
to track the status of every web site on the Internet.  There are several
commercial companies which do that.

Folks have suddenly discovered a number of government sites are out
of service this weekend, and are coming up with all sorts of crazy
theories.  First of all, I don't know if many of the URL's folks
sent me ever worked; so I don't know if the web site is really down or
just another dead web link.  In addition, people should remember most
government webmasters don't work after 4:30pm on Friday.  Its not all
that unusual for a government web site to crash over the weekend and
be down until Monday morning.

Because I don't track web sites myself, I'll leave it up to one of the
commercial web measurement firms to report if an unusual number of
(private, commercial, government) web sites were down over the weekend.

Operational points: I'm assuming its merely an interesting confluence
of events.  The Melissa virus notice is getting big media play, and
some folks are turning off their mail (and web) servers just in case.
Several reports involve web servers located at one provider's facility.
There may be a single cause for those.  And finally, sensitization of
people because of my original message.

BTW, it has been nearly twelve hours, and I still haven't heard back
from any providers involved if there was a simple cause why the sites
were down.  That's not unusual either :-)
-- 
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
  Affiliation given for identification not representation