What is going on? It seems everyone is having trouble with their networks - or at least the part of the network that faces the Internet. Feel free to chime in below - we want to hear your theories on this. Even humor/news Web site Fark.com was down for quite a while.

CNNMoney: Late filers swamp TurboTax

People often assume that because I'm a "21st Century Digital Boy" and do everything from pay 99% of my bills online, meet friends online, get my news and entertainment online, and work online, that I'd be the first person to file taxes online.

I work with computers. I know how badly they can screw things up.

And apparently Intuit now knows that too.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- A flood of last-minute tax filers swamped Intuit Inc.'s e-filing system early Tuesday, causing long delays for taxpayers trying to check that their electronic returns had been submitted successfully.

Intuit, which makes the popular TurboTax and ProSeries tax software, posted a message on its TurboTax web site Wednesday morning that notified filers that they could not access their returns.

As a result, filers who had waited until Tuesday's deadline to submit their federal and state income tax forms electronically did not know if their returns were processed by the midnight cutoff.

April 15th is the biggest day of the year for makers of tax prep software, and it's surprising that there wasn't enough capacity planning to handle the surge. I'm certain that Intuit prepared for a surge, but I don't know if they prepared for the surge they got. Here's one way to find out the information you need for capacity planning.

Network World: BlackBerry owes this guy a girlfriend

I can think of several bad scenarios due to poor network performance. I think this is one of the worst, however.

Just as the smoke is starting to clear from today's massive BlackBerry blackout, Rafael Paz, a loss control specialist for a car rental agency, writes to tell me that he has been "getting my e-mails about one to four hours late minimum since yesterday." And it hasn't just been loss control that has suffered, he adds: "This issue sucks. I've been getting grief about it from my now ex-girlfriend thanks to this delay. She thought I was ignoring her e-mails when I was receiving them hours late."

Ubuntu.com: Ubuntu Feisty Fawn released.

I wrote a very lengthy review of Ubuntu Edgy Eft, (Ubuntu 6.10) for HardOCP. I downloaded and installed Feisty Fawn yesterday (well, the latest release candidate, which has remained unchanged from the final version). It is as if Canonical read that article and fixed every single one of the problems I mentioned. Everything works, there is no need to go to the command line for anything (so far), and its just an amazing release.

Needless to say, their servers are getting pretty hammered. [ZDNet]

Feisty Fawn held up better than the protagonist in the animation Bambi Meets Godzilla: Canonical put up a bare-bones home page with just a single logo and a list of "mirror" sites from which the software can be downloaded. Still, the site was unavailable for more than half of the day, according to site availability monitoring company Pingdom.

"We have been absolutely swamped with hits to the Web site and the mirrors," Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth said in a conference call. "Fortunately there are 160 mirrors out there, all rapidly updating to include Feisty Fawn. We hope the logjam won't last much longer."

Here's the torrent file, if you're interested. I'm seeding from my home computer.