"Rare hardware malfunction" brings down Digital River, Directtrack networks

Theories abound as to what is really happening. http://maxstiegemeier.com/digital-river-server-blackout/

That article doesn't really say anything at all. He harassed some employee who wouldn't comment, that's all.

As for redundancy, yes, that's a good idea, but there is a lot that can go wrong even if you've planned for redundancy. Have you ever yanked a disk out of your RAID setup during peak load? Why not, don't trust the redundancy? And that's why things break, even if the architecture is designed not to.

My only exposure to digital river has been attempting to purchase windows anytime upgrades. I say attempt, as the process just doesn't work.

Its pretty surprising that Microsoft (who run a reasonably functional store on xbox) cant figure out how to run their own online store.

Was it just me or was that article written by a bot? The entire piece just doesn't seem to flow or fit together. Cant really put my finger on it, but it is almost like it was written by a non native speaker.