No Earth Hour on the Internet – Yet

No Earth Hour on the Internet – Yet

Earth Hour is intended to mobilize and manifest support for action on climate change. What if Facebook, after notifying users, decided to shut down for 60 minutes next year? That would be an unprecedented global manifestation in itself.

Pingdom, the global uptime monitoring service, reports no significant increase in downtime last Saturday during Earth Hour 2009. Users across 135 countries did not switch off servers.

Pingdom now challenges all network administrators as well as other web services like Facebook to help in a joint effort to make Earth Hour 2010 an Internet event as well.

“The Internet today takes up a significant amount of the global power output, and considerably more of our collective attention. All servers and web sites are not business-critical and we sincerely wish more companies, organizations and individuals will join us in pledging to shut down any infrastructure they can spare next year to make Earth Hour 2010 a virtual event as well as a physical one,” says Peter Alguacil, Web Analyst at Pingdom.

Pingdom is a global uptime monitoring service, monitoring 35,000 websites and servers in 135 countries across the world and providing instant notification and reports regarding uptime and possible downtime periods.

The company has measured the average uptime (availability) of all those sites and servers during the Earth Hour time range and compared that number to the same period for the three previous weeks. The result showed no noticeable fluctuation around an average uptime of 99.6%, when comparing to the same time range during the three previous weekends.