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Google suffers from more outages

Andrew Lyle   on 14 May 2009 - 23:14 · 14 comments & 3102 views

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Today some of Google's services were unavailable to a small percentage of users, causing problems with all of their services including YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Maps and Google Docs.

Some speculations that AT&T was the root cause of it, but was later denied via twitter that it was not responsible. McAfee argues that the problem was caused by a IPv6 upgrade, but Google failed to respond to that issue.

The exact cause of the issue is not certain as Google's official statement didn't give exact details about the outage. The official statement claims that all of the traffic was routed through Asia causing a traffic jam and slowdowns or outages for many users.

Google posted this official statement about the outage:
"Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That's basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. 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. All planes are back on schedule now.
"

The issues have since been fixed worldwide and all servers restored.

Post a comment · Send to friend Comments · There are 14 additional comments
(3 replies) #1 lunamonkey on 15 May 2009 - 07:06
Why all the plane metaphors? They could just explain it using "Internet traffic was routed incorrectly".
#1.1 Jugalator on 15 May 2009 - 07:19
They did. And in addition to that, gave a metaphor to help out novices, I suppose. :-p
#1.2 lunamonkey on 15 May 2009 - 08:47
Jugalator said,
They did. And in addition to that, gave a metaphor to help out novices, I suppose. :-p


I've never been on a plane though. Can they explain it with buses too?
#1.3 +dead.cell on 15 May 2009 - 14:53
Doesn't work with buses exactly, as I don't believe buses make weird stops far away from their main destination as planes do.

Hell, I've heard of an airline flying people to the other airport in the same city (Houston), but you have to fly to Atlanta first before coming back to land at the second airport... oO
(1 reply) #2 TonyLock on 15 May 2009 - 07:29
Sounds like a DNS issue. I blame Apple!
#2.1 Exosphere on 15 May 2009 - 08:46
TonyLock said,
Sounds like a DNS issue. I blame Apple!

LOL, agreed - it's obvious it's Apple's fault.
#3 cork1958 on 15 May 2009 - 12:00
Happens so often anymore, shouldn't even be posted.
(3 replies) #4 +StevoFC on 15 May 2009 - 14:48
I wasn't even able to visit Neowin when this happened.
#4.1 C_Guy on 15 May 2009 - 15:20
Ironically, this news post failed to load on my first attempt
#4.2 GreyWolfSC on 15 May 2009 - 16:51
Google Analytics.
#4.3 +StevoFC on 15 May 2009 - 19:37
GreyWolfSC said,
Google Analytics.


Yeah, that's what I figured.
#5 IceBreakerG on 15 May 2009 - 15:25
I experienced this problem yesterday. I couldn't access GMail and had a very hard time even getting to google.com as well. I have at&t dsl, but I also have at&t wireless, and could check my gmail account from my phone just fine.
#6 +dead.cell on 15 May 2009 - 19:20
Haven't had any issues and I've been using my gmail more than anything in the past 2 days. oO
#7 +vlsi0n on 17 May 2009 - 07:52
Couldn't get to google.com to search... went to live.com instead.

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