
This morning I noticed that trying load a page on my blog on Firefox was giving me an hour glass while trying to look up civrf.yahoo.com. The page was only partially loaded while it tried to load civrf.yahoo.com. At first I was like, what the heck is civrf.yahoo.com? I don't use any yahoo code on my blog. But then I remembered Yahoo bought MyBlogLog. I looked over at the right-hand side of my blog and noticed some of the thumbnail images of MyBlogLog visitors didn't load, which was a clear indication there was a problem.
Here's a snapshot of the lower-right corner of my browser as I was loading one of my blog's pages. The background should be white, but the page didn't fully load. Note the "Looking up vivrf.yahoo.com" message at the bottom:

I did a DNS lookup of civrf.yahoo.com and nothing was returned. My guess is that someone removed the DNS entry. Maybe as part of the migration process due to the acquisition. Though it was already hosted on Yahoo server. Very strange. In any event, I removed the MyBlogLog code for now. [sigh] MyBlogLog also gives you daily traffic stats. Guess no stats for me today.

I wish browsers, whether it's Firefox, or Internet Explorer or Opera would simply move on and render the next piece of HTML code rather than just get stuck trying to load a piece of Javascript. What's up with that?
Update: 2 min after post
Om points to a major outage at Rackspace, which is Om's hosting company, along with several other large websites. I wonder if Yahoo uses Rackspace - which would explain the MyBlogLog outage.