Little Green Footballs is on the ball, here, having noticed about half of blogdom is missing… if, that is you’re using IE7… saying about 7pm EDT:
I’ve confirmed that there’s some kind of problem on the Internet, that only seems to affect users of the Internet Explorer 7 web browser. Attempting to browse to many sites results in an ‘Operation Aborted’ error. No information about the problem elsewhere yet … stay tuned.
UPDATE at 8/1/08 7:20:27 pm:
It appears to be related to Sitemeter.com — browsing to their web site with Internet Explorer 7 produces the error too.
I have to tell you, I’m A little annoyed to say the least. It looks like what has happened, is that Sitemeter has decided to go chaging it’s code, saying just day before yesterday on it’s blog:
For those of you who currently use the SiteMeter Icon that displays the total visitors to your site we wanted to let you know about some forthcoming changes to this feature.
Following the migration of all our SiteMeter customers to the new platform the counter display image will no longer be part of the tracking code. It will instead be available through a separate piece of code which you paste on your site just like you do with our statistics tracking code.
We’ve done this for a few reasons –
1 – It offers a slight improvement to performance and page load times.
2 – It gives you the option of having it displayed on as few or as many pages as you want.
3 – It allows you to place the code on any page you want, visible to site visitors or on a page only accessible by you the site owner.
4 – It allows you to now have the option of displaying either Total Visits OR Total PageViews.Our plan is that all SiteMeter customers currently using the icon with the counter display image will be have their icons changed to the static default SiteMeter icon following the migration to the new platform. After the migration you can then log into the new system, grab the new counter code at your leisure, select whether you want Visits or PageViews displayed and paste it on only the pages you desire.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause but we hope the new features and benefits will be appreciated.
Do you really think this was enough notice, guys?
It gets better… turns out a lot of their servers are offline today, too, and they report this in a different post:
Greetings,
Our hosting provider has scheduled an outage on August 3, 2008 from 12:01 AM – 05:00 AM to consolidate their network into a single autonomous system. The following servers will be affected:
SM1, S17, S21, S26, S36, S37, S38, S39, S40, S41, S46 and S47
They will be migrating to a new network hardware infrastructure during this maintenance outage. The actual outage time maybe less than scheduled outage time. We apologize that your account will be affected during this scheduled maintenance. If you have any questions please let us know.
Thank you,
SiteMeter Support
Tags: Al, Ann, AP, Ben, BitsBlog, blog, BO, change, Che, CIA, Day, day before yesterday, Don, Ed, F Y, Hat, Ho, hope, Ike, infrastructure, Internet, Men, New, NY, oops, OTB, owner, question, reason, Rove, servers, Sitemeter, system, target, Tim, time, Times, U, UN, update, W, war
August 2nd, 2008 at 18:31
The Conservative Reader was running the icon with no count display and was impacted in the same manner. Plus, BlogNetNews runs with no icon at all (the hidden type) and was also impacted. I think if you are a Sitemeter customer, you were hosed.
Sitemeter has been removed from both of these sites for now. Since I also run Google Analytics on my site, I can at least get general traffic stats (somewhat delayed) on The Conservative Reader.
This kind of impact could be devastating to Sitemeter. I’m not going to count on it being there for me any longer.
August 2nd, 2008 at 20:19
They must have done something today to fix the problem, at least for the non-counting icons, because I was dead this morning in IE7, and I put the icon back just now and I’m working fine.
August 2nd, 2008 at 20:21
Sitemeter has the following message on their site:
Dear SiteMeter Users,
We corrected a compatibility issue with our SiteMeter tracking code and IE7 and IE6 browsers that started last night.
The problem was related to some work we were doing on the backend system for our upcoming website launch.
We’ve identified and resolved two separate but related issues –
1 – IE Users viewing pages – The error occured when the SiteMeter tag was not a direct child of the body tag (e.g. if the tag was within a table or div). Recent changes we made created a failure for visitors viewing sites using Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6.
2 – Accessing SiteMeter and Stats – Individuals trying to access or view their SiteMeter stats by clicking on their SiteMeter logo/icons were unable to gain access. This again appears to have affected only individuals using IE7 and IE6.
At this time both problems have been fixed and our services are fully operational.
For those who removed the SiteMeter code from your pages please be assured that the problem has been resolved and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.
If you have any questions please let us know by submitting a support ticket at support.sitemeter.com.
Sincerely,
The SiteMeter Team