Google Experiences Downtime
The Google network dropped off the radar for many Internet users last Thursday. Widespread outages were reported across several Google services including search, Google Docs, Gmail and YouTube, were the main services that left people scratching their heads and wondering what to do next – best catalogued here by the #GoogleFail Twitter stream.
Not all Internet users were affected, but those using larger American providers such as AT&T or Verizon, appeared to be disproportionately effected. A number of larger US based ISP’s “peer” with Google, or interconnect their networks with Google’s networks in order to improve speed and reduce bandwidth. Much like a large-scale highway accident shutting down a key section of road, the effects still ripple off and smaller ISP’s not interconnected with Google were able to route around the problem.
Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya released a statement that “an error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our Web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam”. The company did not elaborate on what caused the error in a blog post, but claimed just 14 percent of users were affected.
“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”.
Google has faced criticism in the past from analysts and blogs such as Pingdom for loopholes in their SLA in regards to reporting their uptime statistics. This time however, the ever humble giant swiftly introduced the new Google Apps Status Dashboard, which will immediately alert users to any problems with the hosted services or alerts about Google Apps downtime. The dashboard is designed to let users check on the current availability of the company’s various services, which include Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Video.
While the confusion during a downtime is not very comforting, it is important to note that even the Goliath’s we rely upon so heavily for much of our Internet content and usage can still occasionally be tripped up. It’s even more comforting to see Google’s attitude and commitment to learning from these issues however infrequent, leading into the future.
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