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Google's Orkut Down For 13+ Hours And Counting

techcrunch.com — Google’s Orkut social network, which has been having a bit of a renaissance this year, has been down for the last thirteen hours as of 2 am PST. It’s unlikely this is an upgrade given the amount of time the site has been offline. This just isn’t Google’s day.

Who dugg this? Made popular Dec 29, 2006

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  • TheUniphobiac, on 10/12/2007, -2/+28I wish Myspace would go down forever
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18This just in:

    Brazillians find life exists outside computer.

    Film at 11.
  • grooviekenn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15@disillusioned

    "60 people losing their email on a service used by millions (or even just thousands) is nothing. It was promptly identified and dealt with."

    Got to admit though... it really sucks to be one of those 60 people who lost all their email... especially when "Google runs several datacenters, containing more than 150,000 servers, each of which replicating each other"
  • FearNLoathing, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13That may be true for the US, but I think the entire country of Brazil is on Orkut.
  • Jugalator, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9"Yes...Many companies will periodically perform routine maintenance and updates to their services and it very well may impact usage."

    Heh... I doubt "routine maintenance and upgrades" is a cause for an unannounced 13 hour outage. :-p
    I agree the question is dramatizing though, because many companies will have *service problems* during 2007.
  • tutivlahos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Yes, it has.
    http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/12/28/brazil.crime.reut/index.html

    lol
  • disillusioned, on 10/12/2007, -12/+20No. What the hell kind of question is that?

    Google runs several datacenters, containing more than 150,000 servers, each of which replicating each other. There are millions of lines of code behind all of Google's products, and integrating all of their disparate implementations and acquisitions and even existing codebase will occasionally, yes, cause some issues to arise.

    How is this any different than MySpace going down for several hours for maintenance, or worse, having random parts of their site break while they try to fix a mangled CF codebase in the background while the site goes live. "Sorry if you're a user with a number 200,000-500,000, but you won't be able to log in for a while." Then again, at least MySpace has PacMan...

    60 people losing their email on a service used by millions (or even just thousands) is nothing. It was promptly identified and dealt with.

    This is the sort of question for a company's decision to purchase a video site for $1.6B, not for a bit of downtime for one of their services.
  • nandorocker, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9That's because Orkut is HUGE outside America, especially in Brazil and South America. Most people there (and their dogs) have an account on Orkut and use it on a daily basis, while many have never heard of MySpace.

    It's crappy and sluggish, but still looks (and works) better than MySpace, IMHO.
    And yes, there's a lot of spam. Shocker.
  • Jeveran, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Over 50% of the Orkut users are in Brazil. I've never had so much spam in Portugese in my life.
  • d722002, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It's back up... you people can stop crying "end of the world" now...
  • btgoss, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5So has the rioting begun in Sao Paulo?
  • drewolanoff, on 06/10/2008, -2/+5i love orkut. if done right, it could have been a myspace killer.
  • baxtermaddux, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3hey jugalator,

    have you ever experienced a Digg downtime?there was a long one right before the latest revision. they can take many many hours. it sucks.
  • patisawesome, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This reminds me of the great MySpace outage of 06'. That day will always have a place deep in my heart. Oh the tragedy. So many emo kids committing suicide.
  • infowar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Please Google, for the sake of humanity, keep messing up! You are the next evil empire!
  • timdorr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yeah, it's working A-OK here.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm guessing it's the earthquake. Maybe some servers are in Asia?
  • SystemBomb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The next big Digg story, "Orkut is back up with new features!" I give it 24 hours before you see it on the Digg home page.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2well, google does look more and more like your usual business the past couple of years. maybe wikimedia launching a new search engine(..google about it) is the way to go.
  • fortezza, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I am glad it is back up, I was wondering what I what I was going to do after it went down. Oh yeah, the same things I did before it went down. Feel free to speculate what those were.
  • ionut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm sorry but the TechCrunch only said that Orkut is down. The link should be: orkut.com, the actual site that is down.
  • alexvalentine, on 10/12/2007, -6/+7Wow, people still use Orkut? Thats so early 2004. Seriously, it seemed like everyone made an Orkut account around jan-march 2004, and hasn't updated anything in a year. It got so overloaded with spam and non-english users.
  • warza, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's up, tested it two or three hours ago, no problem.

    Why the bitterness?
  • pijalu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Funny, seems to work fine here and now you can even sign-in without invite... cool... so now i just needs friends :-)
  • thejokker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2you dont need an invite to join now, must be what they worked on.
  • davidepaula, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think Orkut was hacked. I lot of people that have account on Orkut received e-mails from them saying their accounts was canceled because of pedophilia a few hours before the website went down. I think they had to shut down because they were hacked. Of course, we won't know what happened.
  • Daniel591992, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5"I've never had so much spam in Portugese in my life."

    How would you know it's spam then...lol?
  • Narrator, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I canceled my orkut account about a year back for good after it turned into a big Brazillian soccer brawling and hooliganism club. Funny thing about Orkut is they were the only Google project based on MS Technology. Google does almost all their stuff in Java, C++ and Python.
  • ernietomac, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4It's STILL down... More than 18 hours now!

    What is Google doing? Rebuilding the whole site?

    Or... Panicking? :)
  • flair1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3I love Orkut. Brazilian girls are hot and love sex with American men.
  • duniyadnd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@disillusioned: First of all, its an interesting question.. I'm not sure why you feel that someone can't ask if Google can keep up a standard of minimal bugs and outages (not saying they can't have bugs, but outages and deleted mails are pretty heavy). And lets not forget that Blogger was going some issues for quite a few users a couple of months ago. As Google continues to create and acquire more and more products, people will expect that they will need to maintain their uptime comparable to their best product - Search.

    Second of all, your explanation is quite basic and doesn't necessarily give the whole picture.

    Google has 150,000 servers, yes.. but each server deals with different products, server A doesn't necessarily take care of Gmail and Orkut at the same time - those are two different products that Google is having problems with - each user's Gmail account, according to some article/paper is on 3 servers, I doubt those same servers are Orkut's - so really, its the equivalent of us complaining that Sony is unable to mass produce their Blu Ray drives and they screwed up with their battery fiasco.

    I have no idea how an unannounced outage of 13+ hours is equivalent to your MySpace example when you use the word "maintenance".

    Another point you could have pointed out is that the Gmail problem only happened on Firefox 2.0.0 browsers - and is not necessarily Google's fault.

    @senfo: sure companies can shut down sites unannounced, but these sites are are all forms of services... it's an inconvenience, and we'll complain about them nonetheless. Take a flight and lets see you not complain that a plane reached late - and many times its not the airlines fault due to maintenance.
  • hypercube33, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Stupid login thing redirects you back to the LAST page you opened instead of the page you logged in on. Lovely! Nothing to see here, move along.
  • floodyberry, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Wrong on the Wikiasari screenshot, wrong on "mass deletings", acting as if Orkut is the only site on the internet that has ever needed maintenance, whining about Google's Zeitgeist because somebody else whined about it.. It sounds more like a sign of the quality of TechCrunch's blogspam.
  • tackle, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4[Quote]Most people there (and their dogs) have an account on Orkut[/Quote]

    woof... woof woof... woof ... woof woofwoof...
  • paulmdx, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Apparently people are misunderstanding me.. When I pointed out the 'affiliation' I meant that Orkut was clearly an acquisition, therefore it wasn't built the same as Google's in-house operations and therefore we can't draw conclusions on the reliability of Orkut vs. say Google Search.
  • Slig, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I really hope they take down it forever. People here on Brazil spend too much time there, when they should spend a little bit of that time on mine websites. =P

    My Google Analytics already shows me a “inexplicable” increase in the number of unique visitors. Which are related to online games/entertainment.

    EDIT: Nevermind... its online again =/
  • ulrichp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0People still use Orkut?

    I mean for things other than spamming my four-years-plus defunct account?
  • smart1979, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1anyone want to send me an invite? I've always wanted to know what goes on behind the curtain.

  • ravencin, on 01/22/2008, -0/+0whatever you do, i think orkut is the best social network http://socialbr.com/orkut.html|
  • monergism, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2I don't check DIGG for status updates of 3rd party websites.
  • gaurav4u99, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1its up and I see no change, no merge with another application..
  • Caio, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Where can I download one of those "life" thingys? Post a link on digg, I bet it will get dugg to death. :)
  • celeb, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4And no one noticed for 13hrs:)

    Orkut sucks in my opinion, always has and most likely will continue to.
  • xsecretfiles, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Are people commiting suicide yet?
  • trouble916, on 10/12/2007, -11/+9On a related note, 45 people are impacted by Orkut being down for 13+ hours and counting... :)
  • kajoob, on 10/12/2007, -8/+5Que?
  • ionut, on 10/12/2007, -9/+6Direct link: http://orkut.com
  • senfo, on 10/12/2007, -10/+6Can a company not shut down their website for service without people blowing everything out of proportion? My goodness. Is this a sign of things to come in 2007? Yes...Many companies will periodically perform routine maintenance and updates to their services and it very well may impact usage. Get a grip.
  • paulmdx, on 10/12/2007, -7/+3Technically speaking Orkut is only "in affiliation with Google", so you can hardly tar the whole Google operation with the same brush. On the other hand, the 'Google' brand doesn't represent invulnerability to problems.
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