We have seen our fair share of failures from web based products, but this morning, for a large number of users (at least in the U.S.), it looks like every Google service has been either wiped off the Internet or is running extremely slow for a large number of users. Even Google Search is only creeping along slowly right now, and YouTube, Google Reader, Blogger, Google Analytics, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Apps are pretty much unavailable as well.
Typically, these outages have never lasted for long, but once again, this outage shows how dependent we have become on Google for so many of our daily tasks.
Final Update (12:30pm PST): Google just released an official explanation for this morning’s outage. According to Google, about 14% of its customers were affected by this morning’s problems, which it attributes to an “error in one of our systems [that] caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam.”
As of now, all of our attempts to contact any Google property are timing out, but we’ll keep you posted once we find out more about this.
Update: Judging from the comments here and the conversations we are tracking on Twitter and OneRiot, it looks like these outages are somewhat localized, though we haven’t seen any patterns evolve yet. It does seem, though, like the outages are mostly in the U.S., though we are also seeing some reports from European users while Google seems to be working just fine in most Asian countries.
Currently, this looks like a networking issue, as users on some ISPs are able to access all of Google’s services while their neighbors are unable to connect to Google’s servers.
There were some reports that this issue was specific to AT&T customers, but this author uses Verizon FiOS and experienced the same issues. There is a chance, though, that any traffic that was routed over AT&T’s network was delayed or dropped, but we are still looking into this.
Update 2 (9:10am PST): Looks like our collective nightmare is coming to an end – more and more users now report that their services are back up and running again. Here in Portland, OR, the outage lasted for just over an hour, though Gmail is still only working intermittently.
Update 3 (9:50am PST): Google just contacted us with this statement, which, even as these statements go, says very little: “We’re aware some users are having trouble accessing some Google services. We’re looking into it, and we’ll update everyone soon.”
Update 4 (10:20am PST): According to Google’s official Twitter account, the issue has now been resolved.
As many other sites use Google Analytics and/or Google’s APIs, this outage does not just affect Google, but has also brought down a substantial number of third-party sites that rely on Google’s services.
If Google is working for you, or if you are also experiencing outages, feel free to vent in our comments section, or use this as an opportunity to check out some alternative services like Yahoo, Live Search, or DuckDuckGo.
