“We know you’ve been eager for this service so we wanted to offer a quick update on the launch plans for MMS on Friday, Sept. 25,” AT&T explained on its official Facebook page. “Late morning, Pacific Time, on Friday, the new carrier settings update enabling MMS should be live and ready to download through iTunes.”

Assuming everything goes as planned. And sources inside AT&T (T) tell DSL Reports that the carrier is “very nervous” that it might not. “AT&T and its MMS partners are already seeing ‘record traffic during peak hours of the night’ with just the users selected for testing,” the publication says. “That early testing has been a little rocky, with AT&T seeing a fairly significant test outage yesterday that has them rushing to beef up their MMSC messaging servers. Estimates among those working on the project are that traffic on AT&T’s wireless network will be about 40 percent higher all day on Friday as iPhone users fire pictures and video at one another.”

Perhaps it’s time to put that beta tag back on.

Google (GOOG) is aware of the issues and is working on a fix, according to a Google Apps Status message:

“September 24, 2009 7:29:00 AM PDT
We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail, but we’ve provided a workaround below. We will provide an update by September 24, 2009 8:29:00 AM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”

UPDATE: Google says it has resolved the issues affecting Gmail “for some users” and expects a resolution for the remaining ones within the hour. One caveat though: “Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Google Outage Caused by Asian “Traffic Jam”
• New From Google Labs: Seriously Offline Gmail
• Hotmail Users Unable to Access Spam for Second Week

On a trip to Seattle, BoomTown visited the headquarters of the Pet Holdings empire, which includes Lolcats (icanhascheezburger.com), Fail Blog and now, Emails From Crazy People. While there, Kara filmed a video with Ben Huh, CEO of the (profitable!) company. There is obviously a method to Huh’s wackiness.

Elsewhere in Seattle, BoomTown got some of the lowdown on the machinations in the wake of the Yahoo-Microsoft deal. Satya Nadella and Yusuf Mehdi are just two of the Microsoft (MSFT) execs charged with leveraging the deal to knock Google (GOOG) out of its number one spot. They each sat down in front of the Flip camera to share their thoughts.

BoomTown also noted the beginning of the Yahoo-Microsoft regulatory filings this week and provided the full document of Yahoo’s (YHOO) 8-K to the Securities and Exchange Commission about the deal. To think: this is only the tip of the MicroHoo iceberg.

If you were one of the many wondering about Twitter’s high-profile outage this week, don’t worry–Kara provided a handy translation of the co-founder Biz Stone’s blog post about the whole matter. If you weren’t wondering at all, you’re not alone–Kara’s mother and older son, Louie, think the whole thing is a waste of time.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s resignation from Apple’s (AAPL) board of directors was just some of the news on Digital Daily this week. In some of the other news, the FTC responded with a “nice try, but we’ll continue our investigation anyway.” Better news for Apple, then, that it claims 32 percent of operating profits in the handset industry, even though it’s only the fifth-largest handset vendor.

In the not-so-good department on Digital Daily this week, NewsCorp. (NWS) (which owns the Wall Street Journal and this Web site) reported a 32.5 percent drop in fiscal-year-adjusted operating income–largely because of its “red-hot” social network, MySpace. Elsewhere, Cisco (CSCO) reported a 46 percent drop in quarterly profit while still beating the Street’s estimates, and Vonage (VG) recorded a second-quarter profit of $2.3 million while losing 89,000 net subscribers in the same quarter.

On Personal Tech, Walt Mossberg reviewed a new netbook from Toshiba this week great battery life and a winning keyboard, among other things. On the Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret reviewed the Wii MotionPlus remote accessory, an add-on to the Wii remote that includes a gyroscope and allows for more precision and sensitivity in gameplay. Walt responded to readers on Mossberg’s Mailbox, answering emails about buying a new no-frills laptop, switching ISPs and moving contacts emails without too much pain, and discerning the minimum system requirements for Windows 7.

Walt went into a little more detail about Windows 7 on his MossBlog. Unfortunately, he discovered that more detail does not equal more clarity when it comes to a Windows 7 upgrade. At his request, Microsoft sent along a handy chart meant to simplify all aspects of the matter for readers. It is an astoundingly, even comically, complicated document. The company has promised to send a newer, simpler one. Stay tuned.

More next week.

Twitter went down around 6:30 am PDT and was live once again by 8:30 am PDT, but remains under attack.

“We are currently the target of a denial of service attack,” said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. “Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we defend and later investigate.”

Interestingly, Twitter wasn’t the only social media service targeted in this attack. Facebook and LiveJournal were hit as well. “Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users,” the company said in a statement. “No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”

Said a LiveJournal spokesperson, “While we can’t be 100 percent sure it was the same attack as on Twitter, Facebook, et al., it would be a huge coincidence if they aren’t tied to one another.” As of this writing, the site was back up and running.

If the Web has a single point of failure, you’d think it was Google, given the outcry over the the outages suffered by some of the company’s services Thursday. Something went wrong this morning and whatever it was had widespread effects on a broad spectrum of Google services–Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google News, Blogger, Google Analytics, Google Docs. It outraged Twitter users and provided Microsoft’s (MSFT) Live Search team with no end of amusement. “Sympathies to the Google servers. Happens to everyone. But this is why the world needs more than one search engine,” it quipped in a tweet.

The source of the disruption? A system error that sent a bunch of Google (GOOG) Web traffic to Asia and waylaid about 14 percent of it, apparently.

This just in from the Google Blog:

“Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and ‘always on,’ so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.”

To make amends for the outage, Netflix plans to apply a 15 percent credit to billing statements of members whose DVD shipments were delayed.

A welcome turn of events after an ugly week that saw Netflix customers losing their patience and the company losing an estimated $1.8 to $3.6 million in revenue each day because of the disruption.

I’d imagine so, if not more. The outage is an ugly blow to the Netflix (NFLX) brand and to its bottom line as well. Citi analyst Tony Wible estimates that the company is losing roughly $1.8 million to $3.6 million in revenue a day. And the reimbursement credits it’s promised to affected subscribers are certain to prove costly as well. Said Wible, “Assuming only one-third [of the company's subscriber base] is affected for one-to-two days, [Netflix] stands to forfeit nearly $1.8 million to $3.6 million in revenues (using a $13.36 average revenue per user), or roughly $0.007 to $0.015 in earnings per share.”

A costly misstep given Netflix’s Thursday afternoon shipping update:

We hope to bring the rest of our facilities back online overnight and be shipping from all of our distribution centers on Friday. But the issues we’ve faced over the last several days have been significant and there’s no guarantee at this point that our shipping operations will be fully restored by tomorrow.”

The S3 service is great but this just proves you can’t rely on it, this is a major issue especially since it’s been down for so long. Way to go Amazon.”

–a post on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service forum

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) suffered a “massive” outage this morning, impacting a number of businesses that rely on the cloud-based storage service. Twitter, Tumblr and AdaptiveBlue were among the more widely known services to be affected, although there were many others. “Amazing how many of the services I use are reliant on S3,” venture capitalist Fred Wilson Twittered this morning. “Stuff is broken everywhere this morning.”

Amazon (AMZN) was able to resolve the issue in a matter of hours, but its failure to inform its customers of the outage and its efforts to correct it drew some harsh criticism from users. “Amazon’s response was substandard in this case,” said one. “I should, minimally, see a message on the front page at aws.amazon.com when there’s a complete outage. Instead, I had to come into the forums to make sure it’s not just my stuff. Like others here, I have a massive number of files (probably about 125,000 audio files, around 1TB of storage) that are for various music libraries. So I have customers with sites that are only partially functional, and nothing to tell them. That’s unacceptable. And I know you can do better. I’m not looking for details of the outage, just an acknowledgment (again, front page of aws) and ETA.”

Said another: “It’s AmazING the fact of having no info on what’s happening. Absolutely unacceptable. Come on, people on this forum are all tech guys, so we understand that bad things happen from time to time. However, you MUST be transparent with your customers and give them details on what’s going on (yes, we want to know exactly what’s happening and not a standard response like ‘The issue is resolved’). In fact, it is not. So please, scale these complaints to the right person and post the technical explanation of the issue as soon as possible.”

So while today’s event is certainly annoying for fans of the widely used VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) service, it’s likely not indicative of some lurking infrastructure problem. “This is the most significant outage for the service in years, yet we already foresee scores of headlines trumpeting the flaws of VOIP communications based on this outage alone,” writes Ken Fisher at Ars Technica. “That’s unfortunate because we think Skype network performance has been spectacular on average, given that it’s free and heavily used. In fact, it would appear that the Skype P2P network is indeed in fine shape, it’s just that the authentication system (which authenticates but also provides location services for routing purposes) is hosed.”