As of 11 pm PST on Friday night, any website or blog using the popular and free web analytics service SiteMeter is not loading in Internet Explorer. This is significant because it’s worse than just one site being down and harming itself, because SiteMeter is an analytics provider any site that’s running it’s code is not loading in IE. This includes all the popular blogs of the Gawker Media network like Gawker.com, Valleywag.com, Gizmodo.com and more. Additionally popular gossip blog PerezHilton.com is also down.
The sites appear to start to load until the Sitemeter tag is rendered, and then get an “Operation Aborted” error from Internet Explorer which then refreshes the site to a blank page.
Since many bloggers and web developers use Firefox or Safari, they may not initially notice this is occurring, but I’m sure there will be plenty of user complaints flooding their inboxes and blogs will begin to sound the alarm. Let’s hope Sitemeter rectifies it quickly.
Sitemeter’s basic service is free, and this may be a case of you get what you pay for, but it’s been a reliable analytics provider for years. This may be a prime example though of the damage that can occur when using a free web service and the impact it can have on a business. It’s unknown whether Sitemeter Premium users which pay for the analytics application are experiencing the same problem.
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The ultimate fix, sitemeter.com is the problem. If you go into your internet explorer security settings and add the following to restricted sites then the page loads.
http://*.sitemeter.com
Hiya, I am one of those thousands effected 🙁 We have had SM for 10 years and never a problem.
My annoyance is that they didn’t make people aware! I am more than happy to pay a fee for this, but why didn’t they advertise this more?
Most people who come to my site do use IE, so this is a nightmare for me, at a critical time 🙁
I have 30,000+ visitors a month 🙁
8pm est was when I noticed this problem last night. I have removed the code from all of my pages.
While adding sitemeter.com to the security settings in our own web browser, that does not help the people visiting our websites. Like Jan, most of the people visiting my site also use IE, so the code goes.
Well, I’ve used them for many years and had loads of problems. I can’t imagine how Jan above used them for 10 years and no problems…perhaps you just didn’t notice the problems. We’ve had piles of issues with slow loading, webpage faults, etc. We’ve had to write them out and rewite them in several times…last night was it for us… We spend the night getting sitemeter out of our back pocket. We have the paid accounts on our business sites, and they still won’t answer our tech support emails. We began to quantify the losses sometime back, and decided that one more major failure and we were done. Hence, our sitemeter free and running site today.
unfortunate, I like the features of sitemeter, but they simply hav not been dependable enough for our business sites to tolerate.
Good luck with your sitemeter.
Dave
This is worrying not only on this specific incident, but on a more general scale. Our web is so distributed and each site stands on its own, yet the past few years’ worth of widgets and scripts are creating new single points of failure that have gone unnoticed.
Take down Google Analytics (or worse, replace it with malicious code) and you’ve knocked down half the web!
Site meter is an Analytics provider to any site that’s running it’s code is not loading in IE.