IT-CRUISERS: Everything IT

The World's most popular Social Media platforms - Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger went down for over 6 hours on October 4th 2021. These super Social Media platforms are owned by one company - Facebook and run on same infrastructure. Reports has it that this 6 hour long outage saw $7 billion wiped from Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth as users flocked to alternative platforms. Image Source: https://see.news/users-report-issues-with-facebook-instagram-whats-app/ I observed the downtime here in Nigeria from around 16:55 GMT+1 when I could neither send or receive messages on WhatApp. Also I observed my Facebook news feed was not getting refreshed with new content. At first I thought the problem was with my mobile telecom data service, but realized I could access other websites on the internet. On making further checks online I saw a report from an online real-time outage monitoring website DownDetector that Facebook was down! There were numerous reports as well that th...

At one time or the other, you may have used or heard such expressions as “Downloading file from server”, “server is slow”, “Authentication required for server access”, and so on. These are everyday expressions used in the present Information Age. Now let us take a closer look at what a server really is, with emphasis on the type of server that makes it possible for access to the Information Superhighway – the Internet, known as Web Servers , as well as what actually happens when an internet user tries to access a website via a Web Browser by sending a (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol) HTTP request to the web server. WHAT IS A SERVER? A server is basically a computer program that serves some sort of content to a client using a specified protocol. The term server also refers to the computer or virtual machine running the server program, which in fact is the most common use and understanding of the term. Today, most enterprise organisations with computer network infrastructure do host th...