Web performance issues and advances have been gaining a stronger presence in the headlines as people are becoming more aware of its impact on virtually every business, and 2015 was no exception. We saw a myriad of major outages this year hit some of the biggest corporations, as well as some technology integrations and other news that we IT Ops aficionados find very exciting.
This past year has offered several opportunities for growth and evolution in the performance realm—even the worst failures presented valuable lessons to be carried into the New Year. So before we dive headfirst into 2016, let’s take a quick look back at Catchpoint’s top blog posts of 2015.
Top 10 Posts of 2015
Neustar UltraDNS experienced a major outage due to a suspected DDoS attack on Thursday, October 15, at approximately 4:20 PM EST and lasted for roughly 90 minutes. It was later discovered that the outage was the result of a technical malfunction rather than a DDoS attack; however, it still prohibited the company from providing services to its customers for a significant amount of time, causing some of its biggest clients, like Netflix, to experience DNS failures.
2. Missed Target: How to Prevent a Cyber Monday Failure
Black Friday weekend has ended, and apparently, ‘tis the season to be failing. Over the course of four days, the eCommerce industry saw a handful of its giants experience major outages. This kind of thing tends to happen every holiday shopping season—one or more high-profile sites crumble under the stress of so many shoppers as a result of poor planning.
3. 3 Last-Minute Tips to Optimize for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
In just a little over two weeks, the online holiday shopping season begins in earnest over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, culminating in Cyber Monday. By now, most eCommerce sites have finalized their code, have a plan in place to ensure a quality online experience for their customers, and are busy testing against that plan. But even if you’re in a code-freeze, as most sites are by now, you can still take some final simple steps to make sure your site is ready for the holiday shopping rush and protect your customer experience at this critical time of the year for eCommerce.
4. Level 3 Outage: A Performance Butterfly Effect
This morning, beginning at 8:40 am UTC (4:40 am EDT), customers of the telecommunications giant Level 3 experienced serious connectivity problems for two hours that obviously had a dramatic impact on their sites’ performance. To make matters worse, as a major backbone ISP, the impact was not just felt by Level 3 customers, but spread to any web traffic that passed through their network. The issue was caused by Telekom Malaysia, whose prefix hijacking caused a route leak which resulted in global routing problems.
5. Another Facebook Outage Causes Ripple Effects Around the Web
Yesterday afternoon, beginning at around 3 pm EST, Facebook started experiencing intermittent outages around the globe for the second time this week due to what the company called a “configuration issue.” And over the course of the next 90 minutes, as the outages became increasingly prevalent, users flocked to a variety of other social networks to complain about the problem.
6. Congratulations Dynatrace-Keynote, But Please Get Your Facts Straight
The web performance monitoring community is a special niche of the larger IT industry; it’s undoubtedly a small world. It’s just not as small as Dynatrace and Keynote apparently believe it to be. After Thoma Bravo acquired both companies several months ago, it was obvious that a merger was forthcoming, with the public announcement being made this morning. And before we get into anything else, let us first congratulate all those involved for working out what had to be a very complicated partnership agreement, and wish them the best of luck on this new venture.
7. Pull Catchpoint Data into Google Docs with New API
Google Apps Script allows you to programmatically create and modify Google Docs, as well as customize the user interface with new menus, dialog boxes, and sidebars. Here, we will walk you through how to pull Catchpoint data into Google Sheets using Apps Scripts.
8. Navigation Timing Is Back in Safari, but Will It Stay?
Tell us if you’ve heard this one before. While WWDC 2015 produced more juicy stories such as their announcement of Apple Music and how the release of iOS9 is their most aggressive play yet to steal market share from their competitors, we noticed one little-reported aspect of the new operating system that is more about trying to just keep up with the competition as opposed to overtaking it: the support of Navigation Timing in Mobile Safari 9.
9. Google Announces End of PageSpeed, but Other Options Remain
On Tuesday, Google announced that its PageSpeed Service, which is used by developers of 14,831 websites (according to Datanyze) to analyze and optimize their site according the best practices of the performance industry, will be shut down to new sites effective immediately, with current users having to change their DNS and remove their sites from the service by Monday, August 3. Failing to do so by that date will render the site completely unavailable. PageSpeed will also be removed from its integration within the Google App Engine by December 1, though in that regard, the app will simply lose the benefit of the PageSpeed optimizations rather than become unavailable.
10. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Bytes
In today’s modern web full of high-speed connections, company brands and their respective product images are the online ‘window display,’ serving to entice prospective customers into their site(s) to purchase holidays, cars, luxury goods, gold iWatches, etc.
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