I was excited about its arrival today.  I already own an HP TouchPad that I picked up in last year’s fire sale and I love WebOS.  It is an extremely friendly and usable OS but, alas, sometimes the 10 inch form factor is a little large and the TouchPad weighs more than its equivalent iPad.  I was looking forward then to trying a dinky 7 inch Playbook and when it arrived I opened the packaging with scant regard for reusing it sometime.

When I turned it on I found that it was still logged-in with the user account of my relative, complete with her settings and possibly even credit-card details for the marketplace.  I decided then to start from scratch and reset the device.  Now you might ordinarily expect a “factory reset” to restore a computer to the point it was at when it left the factory, yes?  On any other device, for example my TouchPad or an iPad, an iPhone, my Windows Phone or any Android tablet a reset would set the machine up for you as you would see it when it was first unboxed, complete with apps for the camera, mapping, photos, music, videos, possibly file management, a few games and of course a web browser.

All I can say is that when I had finished the reset and had created a new Blackberry ID for myself the web browser was there.  I was very alarmed at this point to discover that everything else had been deleted, including all of the apps that you might consider “default” and a part of the operating system.  You can see this in the screenshot above (which I was fortunately able to take despite the camera app being absent).

After a mild panic I hit the Blackberry forums to search for an answer.  Here I discovered a great many people having problems at the same time with, usually new, Playbooks.  A phone call to the support department (at least Blackberry have actual Human beings answering a phone which is an absolute blessing) confirmed my fears, that the company was having yet another server outage, this time to the update servers, following a botched maintenance operation.

The support person informed me that the default apps weren’t on the flash memory in the device, but were instead loaded upon a reset from the Blackberry OS and software update server, which was down, and that as a result I’d been given a corrupt version of the operating system and would have to wait until the servers were repaired and try the whole operation again.

Currently the Playbook is sitting on my desk, switched off as it’s not quite heavy enough to be used as a doorstop.  These server outages at RIM are regularly reported and the achilles heel of the company’s desire to direct all traffic through it’s own closed and secure servers.  The last time there was a Blackberry outage it lasted for several days and affected every country worldwide.  On my very first day with any Blackberry device, here was the evil gremlin laughing back at me.

I’m not saying this isn’t a reason to jump back to my TouchPad, I’ve not turned it on today.  This is a major problem affecting RIM however and its one that is causing them significant problems with lost market share as the 21st century progresses.  I can live without my Playbook for a few more days, frustrating as it might be, but for RIM to survive in the long-term, server outages such as this one simply must be the exception instead of the rule.

Engineers have been working to rectify the problem so that people will be able to use the service over the Christmas period to contact friends and family.

“We take outages like this really seriously and apologise for the inconvenience,” Skype chief Tony Bates told BBC News.  Some people are now beginning to report that their Skype services are slowly coming back online.

At it’s peak the problems were causing the loss of 10 million calls, though the company was keen to stress that its Skype Connect business product was operating normally.

The problems had been caused  by “supernodes” being taken offline.  These communications hubs direct all the network traffic and act similar to a telephone exchange.

“If you want to talk to someone, and your Skype app can’t find them immediately (for example, because they’re connecting from a different location or from a different device) your computer or phone will first try to find a supernode to figure out how to reach them,” it read.

“Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype.”

Skype are expecting that the problems will be rectified later today and that the services will be working normally again for the Christmas holiday period.

In a statement on its blog, Facebook said “For a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were made public to a number of people externally.” read the message. “As a result, we took the site down for a few minutes. It’s back up, and we apologise for the inconvenience.”

Some people got a brief look at the new features, which are not yet ready for launch.  One is called “memories” and indexes what people do on Facebook chronologically.

ReadWriteWeb published a list of five things that people could do during the outage, such as using instant messaging instead, using the telephone to call people or reading a book.

On Twitter, one widely circulated tweet said “Facebook is down. Half the world population had suddenly become productive. The other half of the population is using Twitter.”

This is a mildly embarrasing accident for Facebook but it won’t do any more harm than leaving one of the company’s engineers feeling a bit sheepish for a few days, and it’s one of the hazards that comes with running and maintaining such a large website.

I usually restart my router to be on the safe side but that’s it. Sometimes you can make a connection to the Internet but that connection feels slow, you get disconnections and websites that are not loading properly.

One way to find out if the problem is located on your side is to perform a tracert command to the target server. If that tracert times out you pretty much know the IP address of the server responsible for that along with information about the country the server is in.

This is also the basic approach of Hubble, a service that monitors Internet reachability in real-time. Instead of using one tracert at a time they send out more than 100k every 15 minutes to monitor reachability problems throughout the world using a Google Maps mashup to provide a map of so called black holes, meaning servers that are unresponsive or have a reduced reachability.

The interesting information for the users are the IP addresses or ranges of those servers and the country column of the table. Sorting the column by country reveals problematic server at a glance which can help determining if the problem is located at your end.

These rumors are most likely false. You can still reach Rapidshare.com if you use a Rapidshare IP like 80.239.151.250 instead. The connection is rather slow at the moment and a Rapidshare technican (unconfirmed though) posted a message saying that servers would be back online around midnight GMT.

We will see if the outage is really hardware related or does have other reasons. It is in my opinion unlikely that the police will raid servers on a Saturday instead of a weekday. Still it could be possible. Here is the message posted at the Round Views website.

As of 19 January 2008 16:00 GMT, Rapidshare’s servers appear to be offline. There are rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by the authorities after a court order, however, court records do not reveal any issued Rapidshare court order as of yet. Rapidshare technician Steven Gircham has commented on this issue – “There are rumors concerning attacks made on the Rapidshare.com servers. There are also rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by a court order. These rumors are false. We would like to apologize to our users and inform them that no data has been lost. There have been some hardware issues as a result of high bandwidth and server overload. We are doing our very best to resolve the hardware issues, and users should expect uptime by midnight tonight (GMT)”

My personal opinion is that I would not worry to much and wait to see if the problems are fixed at midnight or in the following hours.

Update: Rapidshare up again !