Little Green Footballs [1] 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 [2] — 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 [3]:
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