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Of Course Microsoft's Home Page Occasionally Goes Down

There is buzz going around today about a comparison, done by Pingdom, of uptime for the home pages of 18 operating system makers, including Microsoft, Apple, and providers of most popular Linux distros. While the Pingdom post does say that it is not intended to "point any fingers," it kind of does so by default. I agree with Dana Blankenhorn that the results make Microsoft look unnecessarily bad.

Pingdom found that Apple's home page downtime over a month was only two minutes, and five Linux distribution home pages had even less downtime than that. Microsoft's home page was down for one hour and 19 minutes.

"Microsoft’s corporate home page is a favorite target for script kiddies and no-goodniks everywhere," writes Blankenhorn. Darned tootin'. People have thrown pies and vegetables at Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer over the years too. Hackers from all over the globe aim at Microsoft's site all the time, along with prominent government web sites.

Pingdom's findings illustrate the mildly notable fact that even very large, tech-focused companies can't always achieve 24/7 uptime. That should be noted by the proponents of keeping all data in the cloud at all times. However, the fact that Microsoft's home page goes down occasionally each month, while Red Hat's didn't go down at all in the month measured, is pretty easily understandable. Maybe people are getting carried away with all these reports flying around on the uptime for cloud computing providers.

Here's a peek at Pingdom's findings. Go Red Hat!:

 

• Microsoft
• Red Hat

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