Google: Personalized home page glitch solved

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Google began rolling out a fix for a technical glitch (specifics were not disclosed) on its Personalized Google.com Home Page service at around 3 a.m. ET on Friday, which affected an undetermined number of users. The company didn't declare the problem solved until almost 2 p.m. ET Friday, about 32 hours after the first problem reports started surfacing. "A number of Google users had difficulty accessing their settings and preferences on the personalized version of their homepages over the past day. Users should have their personalized homepages restored at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our users. We know how important Google Personalized Homepage is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously."

The problem, which kept quite a few users' hands busy typing complaints furiously to Google, erupted at around 6 a.m. ET on Thursday and was fixed gradually for groups of users throughout Friday morning up until just before Google announced the issue had been resolved. In a number of forum postings, users called on Google to offer an explanation for the problem and to let them save their Personalized Home Page settings locally to their PCs.

News source: InfoWorld

(3 replies) #1 bibutteryboy on 27 Apr 2007 - 21:46

is this REALLY such a big deal? It's a flipping home page. people need to get a life if this is their biggest complaint

#1.1 Marshalus on 27 Apr 2007 - 22:01

I agree, it's not like data was stolen or important financial data lost forever. The whole uproar from users about this just confuses me.

#1.2 angrykeyboarder on 27 Apr 2007 - 22:14

Amen!

So they lost some news and blog feeds for awhile. It's hardly critical.

#1.3 vibeone on 29 Apr 2007 - 21:32

Yes It made me laugh.

I was slightly peeved about it - I had it set up nice, and it dissappeared. Nothing more. I got over it.

What made me laugh were the people moaning because they had saved important data in the notes widgets and similar crap like that.

DON'T DO IT. YOU MORONS!

(1 reply) #2 phiberoptik on 27 Apr 2007 - 22:25

Plus they act like it was some huge fix.. "rolling out a fix"

Don't you just re-publish or re-compile your site, and then let the replication take over from there? It's not like EVERY google.com user had to download a hotfix.

#2.1 viserov on 27 Apr 2007 - 23:39

I assume they have to "roll out" the fix across multiple servers.

#3 m-head on 27 Apr 2007 - 22:31

Apparently people were moaning because they lost the homepage they put effort into creating. Pick a few things from the lists, set settings, arrange. 5 minutes absolute maximum.

#4 Mad_Griffith on 27 Apr 2007 - 22:53

I am a potential moaner. It's not vital for sure, but it's quite boring having to find all the feeds again. It is the second time something like this happens.

Last edited by Mad_Griffith on 27 Apr 2007 - 23:07

#5 +Octol on 28 Apr 2007 - 02:27

Many years ago, I was a home appliance mechanic. Occasionally, I'd go on a service call to repair an appliance, only to find that something simple was wrong with the customer's machine – like a loose wire. I would then reattach the wire and give the customer a bill for the minimum service call charge – about $35.00 if I remember correctly.

Naturally, I would get comments like, "What?? $35.00 to fix a loose wire??" To which I'd reply: "Hey, if a loose wire isn't enough of a problem for you, I can always find something more seriously wrong with your machine!" At which point the customer thought that maybe $35.00 for a loose wire really wasn't such a bad deal after all.

In the overall scheme of things, this glitch with Google's personalized home page is a loose wire. The "victims" of this glitch should be ecstatically happy that nothing more serious was going wrong at the time!

#6 cork1958 on 28 Apr 2007 - 11:11

Here's an opinion you don't hear about Google very often:

IT SUCKS!!

#7 Ashl on 29 Apr 2007 - 09:48

Well I'm pleased it's fixed purely because despite what some of the above said it could take longer than 5 minutes to fix if you've got a few highly customised sections. One thing I have noticed now though, on the UK servers we have ended up with borders around all the sections which look pretty rubbish which weren't there before.

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