Saturday, August 02, 2008

Websites crash in Internet Explorer due to SiteMeter's tracking counter

Tens of thousands of websites and blogs are inaccessible after their pages load due to some issue in SiteMeter.


Anyone using Internet Explorer to visit a site which has SiteMeter's counter sees the page loading normally for a few seconds and then an error pops up with the message "Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://tekxplorer.blogspot.com Operation Aborted" and redirects to the "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" page.



This is been happening since 02 August, 2008 and is affecting Internet Explorer version 6 and 7 browsers only. Firefox users are not affected with this issue. I believe that all websites that use Sitemeter are currently down. A number of sites are reporting that once they remove the Sitemeter code, the problem disappears and their page loads fine in IE. Apparently, Sitemeter is still able to log visits and the problem seems to occur just after the SiteMeter logo image loads.

You might find this information useful if you have a blog, since it may be affecting your blog too! SiteMeter, one of the most popular free web traffic counters on the internet, recently made some changes in their website traffic tracking code. The result is that this has been bringing down the internet. You can read more about this at Wired.com: Web Sites Using SiteMeter Are Crashing with Internet Explorer

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was faced with this problem in IE earlier, several blogs are affected.

Sunny said...

SiteMeter Crash Progress Update:

Sitemeter.com announced on it's blog that there is a scheduled outage on 3 August, 2008 on the following servers:

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.

Check the entire post here Scheduled Outage August 3, 2008 (SM1, S17, S21, S26, S36, S37, S38, S39, S40, S41, S46 and S47)