SiteMeter crashing sites viewed in IE

Aug 02, 2008 Blogging, Internet

SiteMeter, the web metrics tracking service, seems to be having big time problems today. When I first logged in to SiteMeter using IE, the page refused to load, then did so partly, before returning an error. I didn’t think too much of it, and simply checked my stats using FireFox.

However, later I received a mail from a reader who said he wasn’t able to view my site at all using IE ! Till this time, I had thought there was a glitch with my IE, since I could access SiteMeter in FF. I anyway use FF and Opera for my regular browsing, so did not face any issues when browsing other sites that used the SiteMeter tracking code, including my own.

A quick check around the blogosphere a while later confirmed that the problem was real, and the worst part was that there was no word from the company at all, except that there was a scheduled outage. The only option that seemed available was to remove the offending javascript tracking code.

After much checking, one fix that seemed more feasible was to use the HTML code instead of javascript, and this seemed to work. An explanation was put up by SiteMeter a while later but I think they lost a lot of goodwill not doing so earlier.