Yahoo email service was down for several hours last week, and as everyone knows, being deprived of email service is a terrible experience. See Internet addiction -- I can quit anytime, previously on these pages. It's probably what it feels like to be in solitary confinement during hard drug addiction withdrawal.
Adding to the anxiety is not knowing whether it's a widespread problem affecting lots of people or an isolated problem only you are experiencing. The first problem may have a staff of techies working on a solution, and the user gets an excuse to complain. The second problem generally requires the user to fix it him/herself and can have varying degrees of success.
As to the widespread problems, the services themselves don't always let their users know there is a problem. And if they do, that info is hard to ferret out. So an enterprising website seeks to do that for us. It's DownRightNow.com where they say they are "combining user reports and official announcements to tell you when there's service trouble." Currently, there are 16 big web services listed along with the time since their last outage. Looks like Facebook was down 25 minutes ago but is up now.
Here's their Twitter link.
There's comfort in a crowd. Yeah, maybe it's the lemming in me, but it feels so much better knowing someone else is experiencing the same problem.
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