When Amazon.com went down for 49 minutes this past Monday, it barely affected any of us. We all checked back with the website and hour later after a coffee break. A minor nuisance if anything, right?

Then again, most of us weren’t aware of the strange and unexplained outages that had affected several other mega-corporation websites only days prior to Monday’s outage. What were the unexplained outages that happened to heavily used sites like Outlook.com, Google.com, Gmail, YouTube, and Amazon within the last few weeks? The outages have since brought forth theories of conspiracies and cries of what could become a Fahrenheit 451 type of world.

On Wednesday, August 14th, the NewYorkTimes website went down for two complete hours. The NYT cited an ‘internal issue’ with their networks.

The outage took place between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., when most people search for news, online. Certain sources believe that the non-availability of the website was due to a cyber-attack. The New York Times Company, however, claimed that it was due to a server problem. –Source: Zacks.com

That same day as the NY Times outage, Microsoft’s Outlook.com website was partially down for three days. The reason given was a technical glitch with one of their caching servers.

Microsoft on Saturday apologized for a three-day partial outage of Outlook.com and said the email service was back up and running, only to note hours later that problems still plagued some customers.

Early Saturday, the Redmond, Wash., company said it had finally resolvedOutlook.com’s issues, which stemmed from a failure in a caching service of Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), the popular synchronization service widely used to sync smartphones and tablets with company email, contacts and calendars stored on Microsoft Exchange Server systems.

“We want to apologize to everyone who was affected by the outage, and we appreciate the patience you have shown us as we worked through the issues,” Microsoft said in a note appended to its services status board.

On Wednesday, Outlook.com, the SkyDrive cloud storage service and the Peoples contacts application suffered partial outages that began around 10 a.m. ET. While the Peoples problem was fixed about five hours later, SkyDrive’s was not fully resolved until Thursday around 4 p.m. ET. –Source: ComputerWorld.com

Two days after the NYT and Outlook outage, the search engine giant, Google, went down. Taking with it the popular websites like Gmail and Youtube.com.  The explanation (or lack of) is just as cryptic as the outages themselves.

Source: Forbes.com

As you may or may not know near all GoogleGOOG +0.31% services went down on Friday afternoon. No one outside the company is quite sure what happened as yet: amusing speculations have been that the Googleplex finally gained consciousness or that someone made the mistake of typing Google into Google. One thing we did find out is that according to one real time analysis company internet traffic dropped 40% during those few minutes. Meaning that we could therefore, realistically, say that Google is 40% of internet traffic.

As Google themselves have said (via email) what happened was:

To clarify, that 11 minutes was came from the posting times of each of the updates on the Dashboard, which is different than the actual incident time.  The dashboard clearly states “Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50% to 70% of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after 4 minutes.”

The outages themselves seem small given that most websites report several outages a year. But it’s when they all combine and happen one after the other that gets folk’s blood pumping and their gears turning. In the dawn of spying allegations against its citizens, the federal government can easily be accused of orchestrating a full major internet-backbone assimilation between the internet and the ever-watchful PRISM system.

We are well aware the the NSA is logging down all your internet traffic, which includes your personal email, web searches, and browsing history. So by association, these mega-corporations (most of which are in bed with top politicians) would be an ideal point to gather intelligence on the American populous. Spying on the tools and websites that many of us depend on daily is one way to proxy their PRISM system.

 UPDATE:

Nasdaq halts all trading due to computer malfunction

Nasdaq said Thursday it has halted all trading — apparently the latest snafu to strike major exchanges and trading firms.

The halt affected scores of big-name stocks, including Apple Inc. and Google Inc., leaving small investors and others scrambling to find out what’s happening in their stocks.

The cause of the glitch is unknown, although Nasdaq put an alert on its website related to something known as its securities information processor, which disseminates stock quotes. –Source: LATimes