(InfoWorld) - Yahoo suffered availability problems on Friday that affected its home page as well as some of its other Web sites and services for a sustained period of time.

Yahoo, which has some of the most popular sites and online services worldwide, first experienced problems on its home page at around 5:50 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time, said Dan Berkowitz, senior communications director at Keynote Systems, a global provider of mobile and Internet test and measurement services.

Yahoo.com's operations began getting back to normal at around 7:15 a.m., said Berkowitz. At its worst point, Yahoo.com's availability dropped to around 60 percent, meaning that 4 out of 10 visitors couldn't access the page, he said, citing data collected from Keynote's global network of monitoring computers, which check the availability of the world's most popular sites.

Yahoo didn't reply to requests for comments about the problems.

NetCraft also detected the problems, saying in a short note that the intensity of the performance issues varied among geographical areas and also among Yahoo services.

"The Yahoo.com home page was inaccessible for several hours from our London monitoring station and responded more slowly than usual from several locations in the U.S. Yahoo Search appears to have experienced lengthier availability problems than the home page and other Yahoo services," NetCraft reported.

A variety of bloggers also reported trouble Friday morning accessing other Yahoo services like Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail as well as other Yahoo sites like the Flickr photo sharing site and the news aggregation site Yahoo News.

Ideally, Yahoo and other major Internet players would never face Web site outages, but they all do, said industry analyst Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence. The key is to make sure that significant availability problems happen infrequently. Otherwise, users and advertisers get worried and upset, he said.

Yahoo's problems on Friday probably affected fewer users than usual because many people are taking time off in the U.S. and are away from their computers due to the July 4th Independence Day holiday, Berkowitz said.

AP - Microsoft Corp.'s $6 billion acquisition of online advertising group aQuantive Inc. has cleared an antitrust regulatory hurdle, the companies said Friday.

It has been over a month since my last update. I just want to put to rest any rumors of TestDriven.Net's early demise. With the help of my lawyers, I responded to Microsoft's lawyers' letter and am now attempting to come to a resolution of the issues. Continuing to play this out on the blogosphere would unnecessarily antagonize the situation and undo the good progress which has been made.

To be clear I am not anti-Microsoft. I am simply a passionate advocate of unit testing for developers of all experience levels. To my mind test driven development is like climbing with ropes. Beginner climbers can gain the confidence to climb without the fear of landing in a mess at the bottom. Expert climbers can take on overhangs and other hard problems that they wouldn't otherwise have the confidence to try. Climb without ropes if you like, but I am certainly not going to encourage it for anything outside your comfort zone.

My concern now is to do whatever is most constructive for TestDriven.Net and the projects it integrates with (NUnit, MbUnit, Visual Studio, etc.). I'm optimistic that a positive resolution can be found. Watch this space.

To end on a happy note the Wells for Zoë charity that many of you supported last year through the .NET Developer's Charity Auction is about to enter a new phase. You can read about the pump workshop which is being set up in Mzuzu, Malawi later this year. There is also a photo blog which is being updated by our guy in the field (when the Internet works). Perhaps the people who suggested I put up a PayPal button to help with legal fees would prefer to save their money for something worthwhile and make a donation here instead. :-)

Europe's burgeoning startup culture just got another boost, with the launch of Seedcamp - a project to support Europe's young entrepreneurs, by giving them funding and contacts. It's very similar to Silicon Valley's Y Combinator, the Paul Graham-led investment fund that specializes in early stage startups. We profiled Graham and Y Combinator in December last year.

Seedcamp was created by Saul Klein from Index Ventures and Reshma Sohoni from 3i. The project is being run out of London. To participate in Seedcamp, entrepreneurs have until August 5 to submit an application through the Seedcamp website. The top 20 teams will then be selected and invited to London for "a week of intensive mentoring and networking" with industry experts in fields like HR, law, marketing, product development, etc. At the end of that week (Sept 3-7), the top 5 teams will be announced and they’ll receive $50,000 euros in funding and an additional 3 months of mentorship.

As Saul wrote in a post on the Seedcamp blog, "we have no more excuses in Europe not to create big, world-beating businesses". I also liked Sumon Sadhu's comment in another post that "geographic separation leads to original insight, lack of group-think and an international outlook." I couldn't agree more :-) So if you're in Europe and have an idea for The Next Big Thing in web technology, go check out Seedcamp.