Russia in contact with shuttle after glitch

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The Russian Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft, carrying the International Space Station (ISS) crew of NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman, Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev and European Space Agency Astronaut Paolo Nespoli, blasts off from its launch pad at the Baikonur cosmodrome December 16, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Sergei Remezov

By Thomas Grove

MOSCOW | Thu Dec 16, 2010 5:18pm EST

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Thursday it was in full contact with the international space station and its Soyuz shuttle after a brief loss of contact with the craft that will soon become the mainstay of the international space program.

Russia's mission control had lost communication with the Soyuz craft for several hours, Interfax news agency reported, quoting an unnamed source in the space industry.

The Soyuz spaceship blasted off on Wednesday carrying a U.S., Russian and Italian astronaut to the International Space Station, where it was expected to dock on Friday at 23:12 Moscow time (2012 GMT).

"At the current time there is a sustainable connection between the Krasnoznamenski (military satellite control center) and Korolyov (Space central command)," Interfax news agency reported Defense Ministry spokesman Alexei Zolotukhin as saying.

The Soyuz flight is one of the last before the United States retires its reusable Discovery shuttles, leaving international space station astronauts completely dependent on Russian craft for missions to space.

A source at Russia's central command said information on the ship's orbit was coming in regularly after the loss of contact.

"The parameters of the orbit of the international space station and spaceship Soyuz TMA-20 stopped coming into space command center around 18:00 Moscow time, but the flow of information was restored between 20:30-21:00," he said.

Loss of contact with space shuttles occurs from time to time, but lasts only a short time.

Central command became alarmed after hours passed without information on the spaceship's whereabouts, and contacted NASA's mission control center in Houston, urging it to use its global positioning system (GPS) to track the craft, said one of the anonymous sources quoted by Interfax.

The United States has planned only two more shuttle missions, after which NASA will hand Russia responsibility for ferrying the ISS crew, at a cost of $51 million per person.

The international space station is a $100 billion project, organized by 16 countries. It has been under construction 220 miles above Earth since 1998.

(editing by Ralph Boulton)

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Update: Facebook is Up...Kind Of (After Downtime)

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Update: Facebook is Up...Kind Of (After Downtime) No Fail Whales

15 comments Thursday, December 16, 2010 ViewComments By Chris Crum 9 Buzz This

Update 3: Facebook has now tweeted saying, "Facebook is available again after being down for a brief period. We apologize for the inconvenience."




Guess it was page related after all.

Update 2: It seems, as a commenter points out, that Facebook is still down for some people. Tweets continue to roll in to that effect. (5pm Eastern)

People are taking jabs at Mark Zuckerberg for being person of the year now. 

Some are saying they were seeing the new page designs before the outage (though we never saw it on ours), so something likely went wrong with the rollout.

Update: It's back up. It's rare for FB to go down like that, but to the company's credit, the outage didn't last too long, especially compared to MasterCard's recent two-day outage. 

For the record, I'm not seeing this new Page design yet either. 

Original Article: Facebook appears to be down, at least for many people. We're seeing a lot of chatter about it on Twitter.

As Twitter user DJDearest says, "Facebook is down. Productivity at offices across the world just went up 356%."

We don't know if it has anything to do with the recent "Anonymous" attacks, but Facebook did recently take down their Facebook Page. Although, Twitter took down their account too, and given Twitter's reputation for downtime, you would think it would be down also. 

Here is a sample of what some other people have to say about it on Twitter:
 

 It's very unusual for Facebook to go offline like this, unlike say Twitter. No Fail Whales to look at though.

Mashable speculates that this is tied to a rollout of redesigned brand pages.  I wonder how much money Facebook is losing while this is going on. 
Touch.facebook.com is working.  News Tags: Social Media, Facebook, Outages About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter.Twitter: @CCrum237 Top Rated White Papers and Resources
By James (WPN reader) - Thu, 12/16/2010 - 16:45 Facebook Down

Yeah I was on posting some updated about 30 minutes a go, profiles and Pages started loading funnty, then poof can't get back on at all right now.

By Chris Crum - Thu, 12/16/2010 - 16:46 RE

Try now.

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Yahoo to close more services after 600 layoffs

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Yahoo is preparing to close more of its online services now that it has shed about 600 employees.

The endangered list includes the content-sharing site Delicious, according to an internal Yahoo slide leaked on the Internet Thursday.

After the slide appeared, Yahoo Inc. confirmed it will phase out several services in the upcoming months without specifically mentioning Delicious.

The company has been getting rid of unpopular or unprofitable services during the past two years to focus on other areas more likely to attract traffic and sell advertising. As part of the reshuffling, Yahoo trimmed its work force by about 4 percent earlier this week.

Yahoo bought Delicious for an undisclosed sum five years ago when the Internet company was trying to build a social hub.

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