Outage Archives - IT Security Guru

Millions of Dollars Potentially Lost in PayPal Outage

The Gurus — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 10:45:35 +0000

PayPal’s services were down for roughly 2 hours on Thursday night, due to a fault in one of the online payment provider’s data centres. The company reported a power outage to be the root of the issue.
PayPal processes around $26 million per hour, meaning that there is a risk tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars could have been lost. Twitter went into a storm of rage as businesses and individuals vented their frustrations on the social media platform.
A spokesperson for PayPal issued the following in response: “The network experienced an intermittent interruption during a period of relatively low traffic. At 7pm PT, the majority of volume is in APAC [Asia and Pacific countries] not in EMEA [Europe and the Middle East] or USA. This interruption was caused by a data center power outage and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
Source: Fortune
Full story: http://fortune.com/2015/10/30/paypal-outage-sales/

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BT broadband in broad-based brownout and TITSUP incidents

The Gurus — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 09:19:27 +0000

If you can’t reach a chum in the UK, chances are they’ve fallen victim to a substantial outage that’s hit BT’s voice and broadband services. Or a Total Inability To Support Usual Performance (TITSUP) incident.
The carrier appears to be suffering from two issues, the first reported to us by Reg readers Colin and Neil who’ve complained of very slow downloads, difficulties accessing the Web, dropped packets galore and traceroutes that don’t make it past the home gateway.
A glance at the carrier’s service status page omits mention of the slow access problem, but does reveal 15 outstanding issues including one that’s hitting over 40 communities from Manchester to Newquay.
BT says “A small number of our customers in the areas shown below, may experience a loss of telephone and/or broadband services. We hope to have service restored as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience this may be causing. Services can be affected by a variety of reasons such as damage caused by 3rd parties or cable theft.”

view the full story here

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Daily News Digest – 27th January 2013

The Gurus — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 16:10:21 +0000

There were no Friday night beers for Google last week as it battled with major outage of its Gmail email service.

According to Techcrunch, the outage affected users in Europe, the US, Canada and India, for around 50 minutes. It said that the error being seen by most users was a (500) code problem, indicating that it was a temporary problem.

Google called it a “disruption” in its Gmail service, according to the Apps Status Dashboard, and after approximately 20 minutes the service briefly came back online for most users, but then went down again. After just under an hour, it once again seemed to be restored and stable for users previously complaining about connectivity.

Plenty of things can cause an outage, and sometimes I wonder if a systems administrator has tripped over a cable, but in this case Google’s situation could have been worse as it managed to contain its problem to only a few applications – Google+ and YouTube were also reportedly affected.

Reports circulated following the outage that a poor Hotmail user called Daniel Peck ended up bearing the brunt of the outage as a bug caused his email address to appear in the compose window that pops up when the top search result for Gmail is clicked.

Peck told Techcrunch that he received thousands of emails, the majority of which were blank. “I’ve been getting thousands of no-subject, blank emails. 500 of them come every hour, I can’t stop them,” he said.

A Google spokesperson said: “Due to a technical glitch, some email addresses on public webpages appeared too prominently in search results. We’ve fixed the issue and are sorry for any inconvenience caused”, and confirmed that the glitch was not related to the Gmail outage.

Now, in times of failure it does not pay to point and laugh, because you never know when it will happen to you and you will need your friends close. In this case, search and webmail rival Yahoo was not especially scathing, but it didn’t make the greatest effort with a tweet saying “Gmail is temporarily unavailable” with an image of Google’s “Temporary Error (500)” page.

Many people would have likely taken no notice of this, except I was one of those who became aware due to Yahoo’s apology that said the tweet “reflected bad judgment was posted and has been deleted” and apologised to Google and the Gmail team.

In other Google news, a privacy flaw was revealed that displayed email addresses without the consent of the user. Upon creating an event, and putting a Gmail address in the subject line, that user will have the event added to their calendar, will not receive an email notification but will get a “meeting reminder” pop-up. When you delete a calendar item, the “Cancellation” notification is emailed regardless of whether the user received the original invite.

In other words, if you entered a phone number into the invitation the recipient would receive it, or if you put something derogatory about the person, they would see that too. I talked to some penetration testers who agreed that the security element was minimal, but there could be privacy issues.

Google seemed to agree, telling Terence Eden (who disc
overed the flaw) that after “careful consideration by our security team, we feel that the issue has minimal impact on the security of our users”. After press interest of the flaw, Google later agreed that the behaviour “is undesirable” and it had filed a bug with the Calendar team.

Nice to see some action, although Eden seemed slightly aggrieved at the lack of a bug bounty! Perhaps it takes a little online action to stimulate change, but this is a series of events that Google will want to learn from and avoid in future. Maybe the future is in artificial intelligence, as its £242 million acquisition demonstrates. Can machines fix such issues?

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