Google's outage statement, May 14, 2009

[Al-khiyal]

Google's outage statement

May 14, 2009 -- Google representatives have now officially confirmed that their services were interrupted for a few hours this morning, but that's about all they're willing to say at the moment. Here are their statements in full:

"Earlier today, Google News was temporarily unavailable for many users, from approximately 3:30 AM until around 7:00 AM, Pacific Time. This issue has now been resolved. We know how important Google News hit is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously. The issue affecting some Google services has been resolved. We're sorry for the inconvenience, and we'll share more details soon."

Not exactly the most enlightening remarks, but the company is probably still scrambling to figure out just what went wrong in the first place. Which leaves everyone still wondering if the site was hacked. After all, it wouldn't be the first time; TechCrunch reports that hackers, most likely from Pakistan, seized control of Google's Morocco page last week. Hackers also took control of Google's Puerto Rico and Algeria pages last month.

Does someone have it in for Google?

[Al-khiyal]

Glitch takes Google offline for several hours

May 14, 2009 -- A number of people around the world — some sources say in the millions — were suddenly cut off from Google's services earlier today for about an hour following a glitch in some of the company's data centers, causing many users to realize how they have become dependent on a single service provider for most of their Internet needs.

Starting this morning at about 10:45 AM Eastern Time, Google and many of its services (News, Gmail, Reader, AdSense, and many more) started to move extremely slowly, and in some cases even stopped working for a period of a few hours.

Google didn't immediately comment on the outage, even though it did confirm an earlier Google News blackout that lasted three and a half hours. As a consequence, users turned to micro-blogging website Twitter to connect and try to understand what was happening on the #googlefail dedicated channel.

Later on, Google released a vague statement in which it said that technical problems had prevented a "small subset of users" from accessing Gmail, and that a cascade effect eventually lead to problems in the Google homepage too, thus making it impossible to search the web through the Mountain View giant for many users around the globe, who turned to Yahoo and Microsoft's search engines for the occasion.

Microsoft's Live Search commented briefly: "Sympathies to the Google servers. Happens to everyone. But this is why the world needs more than one search engine," and many speculate that Yahoo gained considerable traction as a result of the disruptions.

By 2 p.m. Eastern time, Google said it had the problem under control. "The issue affecting some Google services has been resolved," the company said in a statement. "We're sorry for the inconvenience, and we'll share more details soon".

While no further details have emerged thus far from Google itself, some had initially speculated that the problem was caused by AT&T routing; however, this wasn't the case as the issue affected subscribers with other operators as well, including Verizon, Cox and Charter.

Apart from a breakdown due to a human error, the only other reasonable explanation that has come up so far would be hackers temporarily seizing control of the Google properties. Last week, TechCrunch reported that a group of hackers, most likely from Pakistan, gained control of Google's Morocco home page as well as Puerto Rico and Algeria's.

Google has invested billions of dollars to create a reliable and efficient computer network to minimize the chances of a breakdown, but experiences like these remind Internet users that even what is regarded as one of the top IT companies in the world (if not the best one) is not failsafe. Gmail in particular has been susceptible of repeated outages during the five years since its inception.

The Internet was originally built to sustain basic communications in case of a nuclear attack, but has evolved into a tool for providing a multitude of services to millions of people from a few large sources. However, the outage has made it clear that Google has become central to the online lives of hundreds of millions of people, which have become largely dependent on a single service provider to take care of everything, from chat to search and email.