Website monitoring service Pingdom is back online after an outage of several hours Saturday morning.
Website uptime monitoring service Pingdom is reporting that its systems are back online after an outage that hit the service for several hours Saturday morning.
The irony of the downtime being suffered by the service designed to ensure uptime was not lost on Twitter users commenting on the interruption.
“Looks like Pingdom is down. Who monitors the monitors?” said programmer @thomasfuchs in a post.
Jokes aside, Pingdom appears to have restored its services quickly enough to have avoided any serious public customer complaints.
Pingdom reported via its own twitter account at about 9:00 a.m. Eastern that the site was unavailable, writing “We’re experiencing an issue with our site. We are investigating and will update here as soon as possible.”
After updating several hours later that it was still working on fixing the problem, Pingdom reported at about noon Eastern that its services were back online.
“Our systems are now returning to normal operations. We apologize for any inconvenience caused,” said the company in a tweet.
No word yet on what might have caused the outage, but there’s good reason to expect a full report from the company. After a June 2011 outage, Pingdom posted a full report on the causes of the outage, and the company’s plans for avoiding similar situations in the future to the excellent Royal Pingdom blog.
“We tend to say that no service is immune against downtime, and that includes us,” the company wrote, in the post. “What matters is that you resolve it, and learn from it.”
After the 4-hour outage in 2011, which the company referred to in the blog post as, “by quite some margin, the single largest issue we’ve ever had with the Pingdom service during the four years we’ve been around,” Pingdom said it was making changes to improve its systems.
Those changes, it said, would include more locations with backend functionality, more redundant hardware and failover capability, more spare parts on-hand at its locations, more fail-safes in place to improve recovery from issues, and code modifications to help it handle extreme situations.
Pingdom is a popular tool that clearly has a lot of appeal for the customers of web hosting companies. The company says it is developing an affiliate program, through which hosting providers could profit from offering customers access to the service.
Talk back: Do you use Pingdom to monitor your own systems? Is it a popular tool among your hosting customers? Were you or your customers impacted by the outage? Let us know in the comments.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes” (Who guards the guards) was always in my mind professionally and more so politically!
The answers here is simple:
always establish a hidden watcher and let it be freely known that you have done so.
I do use that company and in keeping with my own beliefs stated above, I use a second and separate monitoring company to monitor the same websites and it is often very interesting to note disparities between the two reports…..
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I used to suffer from paranoia, but I was cured when I found out-that they were out to get me.
Not such much the downtime, but more the time it took to acknowledge there was a problem and deal with it. No CS presence at all. Switching to other web monitoring such as StatusCake.com asap. Can’t be reliant on one service!
Hey Liam.
Great post – we obviously were watching the Twito-sphere as Pingdom users were having trouble – and I’d really recommend everyone to not just relay on a single uptime monitor. I’m one of the team at http://www.statuscake.com where we offer free unlimited website monitoring with a lovely bunch of features. We’ve seen great growth in the past 6 months and would love if you or indeed any of your visitors come and joined us (once again; tis free!). And if you do decide to upgrade at any point to a paid plan then feel free to use the coupon WHIR-WHIR-WOO for 20% off!
Thanks!
Daniel.