Leading Hotels of the World, the fancy-lodging chain I only ever hear about in airline-magazine advertisements, has badly flubbed a discount offer celebrating its 80th birthday. So many people tried to get the chain's $19.28/night discount rate that its servers supposedly crashed.Sure, blame the sysadmin. What the company is telling customers: It's hired Akamai Technologies to make sure the site stays online. But what we're wondering: Did someone forget to put a cap on the offer, and pull the plug on the website after more people than expected signed up for the $19.28 rate?

We knew things were looking grim in the fatally overcrowded online ad-network space. But this is ridiculous. AdBrite's homepage currently states that the network, favored by smaller publishers, is serving "0 impressions a day on 0 sites." A glitch in its stats mechanism, surely — but also a harbinger of the shakeout to come. We hear persistent rumors of high turnover in the site's sales department.

Josh Silverman, president of eBay's Skype Internet-calling service, has issued a mea culpa blog post. The short version: Tom Online, Skype's Chinese partner, is storing instant messages sent over the service — and storing them insecurely, to boot. [Skype Blogs]

In the past year, Apple earned top scores in both customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. It's a tribute to the power of marketing. And for Apple customers' collective delusion, we credit Greg Joswiak, a top marketing executive who handled Mac hardware before he moved on to pushing iPods and iPhones.While Apple products may be shiny, easy to use and full of whizbang features, going back at least as far as 1999, they've been often unreliable and sometimes dangerous. Five reasons Joswiak deserves a raise, below.

Thinking about making a run on your bank from the privacy of your own home? If you're a Bank of America customer, good luck — the site has been down since 8 a.m. PST, and the problem has seems to have grown worse since it started. At first, users couldn't verify their "SiteKey" to access their accounts. The company then disabled online access and posted a note to the homepage, pictured. I couln't even access the homepage until just now, possibly because millions of customers are now desperately checking and re-checking the site to see when access is restored. Now that I can get in, it looks like I still have some money! So don't panic — I'm sure Bank of America, like the rest of America's financial services industry, has everything under control.

Pride cometh before the fall, with Lehman Brothers having spent $309 million on information technology infrastructure in the quarter before the venerable financial firm went belly-up, which was up from $282 million the previous quarter. The company spent $1.1 billion on IT in 2007. Projects included a system for the London Stock Exchange to create an anonymous, automated way for traders to do business (which, in the wake of the United Airlines share price debacle, sounds like a fantastic idea). While the relevant divisions can be split off and sold (and the IT grunts are still hard at work), as more banks fail, selling IT equipment to financial firms doesn't look it's going to be a growth business for some time to come.

Journalists hate when this happens: Federal investigators say Friday's fatal collision of a Ventura County Metrolink commuter train with a freight train may not have been caused by an engineer busy with text messages, as was reported over the weekend. The spokesperson who blamed the engineer and called it "unbelievable" that he'd been texting on the job has resigned. The National Transportation Safety Board says they've found evidence of missed safety checks, but it'll be months before they determine the cause. Here's the Contra Costa Times's wrapup of recent reports:

Terry Childs is the San Francisco government systems administrator who, threatened with losing his job, took over the network. Childs finally gave in from his jail cell and handed mayor Gavin Newsom the passwords he'd changed, along with a liturgy of hate for his pointy-haired bosses. San Francisco bureaucrats make Childs out to be another Kevin Mitnick, capable of breaking into confidential data. Truth is, he's a grunt router admin who got sick of being on call 365 days a year. Here's a rundown of the exaggerated claims San Francisco officials are heaping onto Childs:

Running on Windows Vista, Apple's iTunes 8 isn't actually a computer virus, according to WordNet's strict definition of term as "a software program capable of reproducing itself and usually capable of causing great harm to files or other programs on the same computer." But that's only because iTunes 8 doesn't replicate itself and spread other computers. It is causing plenty of harm to computers, according to complainers on an Apple Support forum. They say they're seeing Windows's infamous "blue screen of death" reboot screen anytime a user plugs in an iPod or iPhone and launches iTunes 8 at the same time. We can already hear th fanboys telling us how this is all Microsoft's fault. (Photo by tomeppy)

What exactly went so horribly wrong with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, the one customers waited seven years for only to have a steaming pile of fail land on their laptops? That's the question Maximum PC had for representatives from Team Redmond. After the jump, the key problems a surprisingly candid Microsoft rep admitted hobbled the launch.

Ever suspected those "Report Bug" tools in Web browsers leave you shouting into an abyss, your feedback discarded? An engineer at Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has just confirmed that's actually been the case for months. Mark Smith explains that his misconfiguration of database led to the loss of three months of data about websites which users say Firefox doesn't display correctly, information Mozilla uses to "help prioritize fixes to the browser."The loss is especially ill timed, given the recent launch of Google's Chrome browser, which Google says uses the search engine's extensive index of the Web to test for display bugs. Smith is taking the error like a man: "I fucking did it and it was my fault and that's that." But he might want to update his recent post about optimizing database configurations for Web applications. Experience is the best teacher of all.

British traders should've been buying and selling like mad earlier today on the news of the U.S. government's effective nationalization of sputtering loan giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Instead, they got kicked offline. A spokesperson for the London Stock Exchange says the exchange's TradElect trading system didn't crash — there was a "connectivity issue" at 9:15 am London time. That's about as technical an explanation as we're likely to get today. (Photo by jam_90s)

Can Google charge for a service it mostly gives away — and that doesn't always work? That's the experiment it's conducting with Google Apps. Gmail, the email service at the heart of Google Apps, went down three times earlier this month, and Google has sent a note to customers who pay for its "Premier Edition" — typically colleges and small businesses. As Fortune notes, Google hasn't had much success breaking into the large business accounts where Microsoft rules. The tone of Google's apology speaks volumes. It's mostly apologetic, but there are overtones of Stanford-comp-sci huffiness:

Google's named after "googol," an incredibly large number — misspelled. Does it surprise you that the search engine makes mistakes with math, too? Just for fun, watch what happens when you use the Google calculator to solve equations involving a Googol (10^100).Click each formula to see Google's calculator results: 10^100 (10^100) - (10^6) = 1.0 × 10^100 (10^100) - (10^90) = 1.0 × 10^100 With a few minutes' patience, you can do any of the above calculations by hand on a white board. A hundred digits isn't really that many. But Google shouldn't feel too bad — my copy of Excel failed the test, too. (Screenshot via Blogoscoped)

Luxer-than-thou retailer J. Crew has mostly avoided the economic pinch, since its customers barely notice that they're paying $4 a gallon for gas. Instead, the retailer has been laid low by buggy software, reports the Business Technology blog. One outraged customer, shown here, was billed $9,208.50 and shipped baby-size shirts, not the mediums he'd ordered. J. Crew's net income in its most recent quarter fell 12 percent from the same period last year to $18.1 million, and the company said it spent $3 million to fix the problem. Do the math: Had J. Crew not had the software problem, its income would have been up 2.5 percent. It's a shameful comeuppance for J. Crew CEO Mickey Drexler."Retail is detail; Mickey lives that," a Wall Street analyst told the New York Times in March for a profile which tracked Drexler's obsessive visits to stores, where he talked to customers at length about style and fit. Alas, no such attention to detail was on display when it came to J. Crew's website — which increasingly is how customers interact with the company. Drexler reads and answers a lot of email, according to the Times. But it sounds like he should spend less time in stores, and more time camped out in the datacenter.

Google's calculator function fails when handling large numbers. News.com's Stephen Shankland opinionates: "Any company that named itself after a big number must be held to a higher standard." Cut the Googlers some slack, Stephen: How are they supposed to maintain optimal blood-sugar levels for accurate coding when Larry and Sergey are taking away their snacks? (Screenshot via Blogoscoped)

Sent in by a tipster: A leg bedecked with a tattoo of Twitter's "fail whale," the cetacean mascot deployed when the short-updates site takes on water. Can you think of a better caption? Leave your suggestion in the comments. The best one will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner is trisomy21 with "Sergey, we're going to need more dark fiber." (Photo by morrowplanet)

The power is out in South Park, San Francisco's startup epicenter. Wired and Yahoo Brickhouse — in the same building — are affected. Caffe Centro is down. Jack Falstaff isn't answering the phone. Six Apart, a block away on Fourth Street, is up. Workers are roaming the neighborhood. Got any more data points? Send 'em in to tips@valleywag.com.

Sunnyvale-based storage startup Agami called an all hands at 11 AM, Monday, August 4. "I thought we were getting bought out,'' one sales rep told the Mercury News. Instead, CEO David Stiles told his employees that the company was shutting down and that everyone had to clear out by 1 PM. "Basically we all felt betrayed,'' another employee told the Mercury News. They had reason to be surprised. Agami only closed its third round of funding in February, after raising $45 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins.Employees — now without health insurance or expenses repaid — got an email address for pay requests, but so far employees say correspondence has been all one-sided. Asked why the company so suddenly folded, founder Kumar Sreekanti said: "Agami's board has decided to shut the company down as the efforts to raise further capital didn't materialize in time." Dan Warmenhoven, CEO of NetApp, doesn't buy the excuse — "You don't raise $45 million and then get shut down. That doesn't make sense," — and neither do we. Sreekanti has worked as the CEO of a Kleiner Perkins-backed startup before, so our guess is Sreekanti is keeping quiet trying to be a "team player" for the boys on Sand Hill road in order to stay on their roster of cooperative executives ready to work on — and sometimes unceremoniously shut down — future ventures.

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry claims “there have been multiple cases of overheating and fire damage, in particular during recharging" iPod Nanos sold during the model's first year of production in 2005. An Apple spokesperson confirmed that “in very rare cases”, batteries in first generation iPod Nanos sold between September 2005 and December 2006 can overheat. Full statement from Apple: