Dropbox suffered a major outage over the weekend.
In one of the more bizarre recent incidents, after the service went down on Friday evening a group of hackers claimed to have infiltrated the service and compromised its servers.
However, on the Dropbox blog, Dropbox VP of engineering Ardita Ardwarl told users that hackers were not to blame.
Ardwari said, “On Friday evening we began a routine server upgrade. Unfortunately, a bug installed this upgrade on several active servers, which brought down the entire service. Your files were always safe, and despite some reports, no hacking or DDOS attack was involved.”
The fault occurred when a bug in an upgrade script caused an operating system upgrade to be triggered on several live machines, rendering them inoperative. Although the fault was rectified in three hours, the knock-on effects led to problems that lasted through the weekend for some users.
Dropbox has assured users that there are no further problems and that all users should now be back online. It said that at no point were files in danger, adding that the affected machines didn’t host any user data. In other words, the “hackers” weren’t hackers at all, but attention seeking trolls.
Dropbox claims to have over 200 million users, many of which it has acquired through strategic partnerships with device manufacturers offering free storage with purchases.
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The company is looking forward to an initial public offering (IPO) on the stock market, so the timing of such a major outage could not be worse. Dropbox, which includes Bono and The Edge from U2 amongst its investors, has recently enhanced its business offering to appeal to enterprise clients, and such a loss of uptime could affect its ability to attract customers.
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Google, which last week created a bit of chaos with the launch of a Gmail application for Apple iOS devices, has decided to put out discontinue its Gmail application for the BlackBerry.
As of Nov. 22, Google will no longer offer technical support to users of the application, nor will it allow people to download it anymore, the company wrote in a blog post.
However, people will be able to continue using it, although Google will put its development efforts on the version of the application for mobile browsers, available at gmail.com.
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More workers use iPhone and Android smartphones combined than BlackBerry devices, according to a survey of 1,681 U.S.-based workers released today by Forrester Research.
That finding highlights what many have known for a while about the entrenched workplace smartphone veteran: the BlackBerry faces trouble from its competitors.
The BlackBerry, made by Research in Motion, still leads among U.S. workers, with 42%, the survey said, with Apple’s iPhone accounting for 22% and Android devices, 26%.
The survey also found that nearly half, or 48% of the group, said that they chose the primary smartphone used for their work without considering what their company supports. Only 29% said they chose the smartphone from a list of phones the company supports, while 23% said they had no choice in the matter.
Often, corporate IT shops will choose BlackBerry smartphones when requiring a worker to use a specific smartphone, partly because of the perceived security benefits, many analysts, including at Forrester, have found. The growth in Android phones and the iPhone — many of them brought to workplaces by workers independently — are forcing IT shops to rethink that decision, however.
Ted Schadler, a Forrester analyst, said the survey points to two major trends. The first is that more workers than ever are bringing consumer-focused devices, such as Android and iPhone smartphones, to use for work, and more companies are supporting those devices.
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Apple customers are increasingly unhappy with the company’s technical support, which could affect the firm’s bottom line in the future, a researcher said today.
Although Apple continues to outperform rival computer makers Hewlett-Packard and Dell in overall customer satisfaction with technical support, in several areas Apple’s slippage over the last year is alarming, said Peter Leppik, CEO of Vocalabs, a Minneapolis-based company that surveys consumers after they’ve contacted customer or technical support.
“Apple is still definitely ahead of its competition, but what we are highlighting are deeper metrics that are showing negative trends,” said Leppik. “Customers are upset with the automated part of support calls to Apple, and that might be trickling into higher metrics.”
Those higher metrics Leppik referenced include the likelihood customers will return for another purchase in the future, or continue to recommend Apple products to friends and family.
In the past 12 months, consumers who said they were “very satisfied” with Apple’s technical support dropped 15 percentage points, from 73% at the mid-point of 2010 to 58% halfway through 2011, said Leppik.
The primary cause of the tumble was a turnabout in customers’ opinion of the automated section of their calls to Apple. In the last year, the percentage of those who said they were very satisfied with the quality of Apple’s automation fell 13 points to 24%. That’s a new low for Apple in Vocalabs surveys, and a whopping 28 points off the peak of 52% a year-and-a-half ago.
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Android will be the operating system of choice for 45% of smartphones shipped by the year 2016. It will take up most of the market share vacated by the soon-to-be exiting of Nokia’s Symbian operating system, according to figures released today by ABI Research.
Although Android will come to be the dominant player in the smartphone market, this doesn’t mean that OSes will necessarily see a big cut in their own market shares, ABI said.
In fact, the firm projects that Apple’s iOS will see its market share rise from 16% in 2010 to 19% in 2016, while Research In Motion’s BlackBerry OS is expected to fall slightly from 16% in 2010 to 14% in 2016. Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 and Samsung’s Bada will also be players in the 2016 smartphone market, as ABI projects those two operating systems to take 10% and 7%, respectively.
ABI vice president Kevin Burden says that although RIM stands to lose a bit between now and 2016, the company will carve a comfortable niche for itself in the enterprise market, as enterprise users will still need the security provided by RIM’s network operations center.
“RIM’s slight loss of share doesn’t mean falling shipments,” he says. “RIM has found its niche, but the consumer market will grow faster than its portion of it.”
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American Express has just debuted a digital payment and commerce service that makes it possible to use Android-based devices and Apple iPhones for person-to-person online payments. Visa announced a similar personal payment product in the U.S. on March 16.
Analysts say the moves by Visa and American Express are clearly aimed at challenging PayPal in the personal payments business.
The new Amex service, named Serve, allows consumers and small businesses to make purchases and person-to-person payments on iOS- and Android-based devices. Serve accounts are also accessible on personal computers through Facebook and at Serve.com.
Serve also allows users to create and manage sub-accounts for friends and family members.
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Google is joining Citigroup and Mastercard to establish a mobile payment system that will turn Android phones into a kind of electronic wallet, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The new system, which is in its early stages, will allow consumers to wave their Android phones in front of a small reader at the checkout counter to make payments, the Journal reported.
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Motorola Mobility has snagged a number of experienced mobile and Web engineers from Apple and Adobe and is developing a Web-based mobile operating system as a potential alternative to Google’s Android software, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Asked to comment, Motorola did not refute the existence of the project but continues to affirm its interest in Android. “Motorola Mobility is committed to Android as an operating system,” a company spokesperson stated.
Jonathan Goldberg, an analyst with Deutsche Bank in San Francisco, said that he too had heard Motorola was at work on its own operating system. “I know they’re working on it,” “I think the company recognizes that they need to differentiate and they need options, just in case. Nobody wants to rely on a single supplier.”
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Dell is apparently in the process to debut two new microservers that are equipped with low-power consumption efficient processors from AMD and Intel.
Representatives from Dell stated that the PowerEdge C5125 and C5220 were built for businesses that want to set up cloud computing infrastructures. Dell’s Barton George wrote in his blog that the C5125 will utilize AMD processors and will ship next month and the C5220 which will have an Intel processor will ship in May. The PowerEdge eco-friendly servers will have a dense 3U infrastructure that has 12 one-socket servers that can be used for running one application. These types of servers use four times less rack space and cabling which makes data centers more efficient.
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This is shaping up to be quite the season for the tablet wars as Research In Motion’s long-awaited device, the BlackBerry PlayBook, is set to go on sale in the United States and Canada on April 19 at a base price of $499.
RIM said on Tuesday it plans to sell the PlayBook through retailers and wireless carriers including Best Buy, AT&T, Verizon, Radioshack, Sears Canada and Wal-Mart. ReadMore….
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