The morning of the 14th, for about an hour or two, Google went down. Or in some cases, just moved excruciatingly slowly—but that was for only about 14% of its users. Reports in online news outlets and on Twitter spread the word that people could not get to Google News, Gmail, Google Apps and even Google.com. Apparently the problem occurred after an error routed much of Google’s traffic through Asia, where the servers couldn’t handle the load.
The official Google blog puts it this way in it’s post entitled “This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern…”
“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.”
The post was written by Urs Hoelzle, SVP of Operations, who went on to apologize, saying “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.” He ended by assuring users that all planes were now back on schedule.
Wired.com points out “Actually, the fact that Google’s slip-up causes such a stir in the media, on mailing lists and on Twitter, says much more about Google’s centrality to the internet.”
On Twitter, the term “#googlefail” was the top “trending topic,” indicating that many users were posting about Google’s troubles. Meanwhile, CNet reported that the problems appeared to affect users worldwide.