Google Fails Again!

[dwarakesh]

For the second time in as many weeks, Google gave its dedicated set of users a scare with most of its services going down and remaining unusable for close to two hours. YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Docs, AdSense and Blogger users were the most affected by the outage this time.

Outages are common, they just happen. It's quite normal for websites, services and networks to fail --occasionally. However, if the company happens to be Google, which incidentally handles close to 5% of all Internet content, we're talking of BIG issues! And going by the recent trends there has been a steady increase in the number of outages - with the last one being reported just a week ago!

Pictures as they say, speak a thousand words. So check below the visual cue of what actually happened when Google went bonkers -- for two hours. The graph shows the average traffic across the major ISP's in the US. Look at that steep valley (which denotes a steep traffic dip) between the 11:10 AM and 12:50 PM mark. This is at around the same time when Google services started acting up.

This time around, as soon as the first news of the services being down spread, IRC channels talked about DDoS scares, Twitter users started speculations of a worm on the prowl while some others blamed an ISP for all the troubles. After all the rumors and speculations, the news was confirmed. Google was down after all. Then the news spread. Fast. But no one knew what had caused this one. As always, people waited for an official explanation from Google (in typical Google Style) - and boy, they did not disappoint!

A few hours later, a senior official from the company, Urs Hoelzle, clarified in a blog post, the reason for the disruption. The latest downtime was blamed on a "routing error" that caused all Google traffic from the US being routed via Asia, (most of which was thankfully sleeping) resulting in a virtual traffic Jam. And you know what happens when you're stuck in a traffic jam. You slow down.

The glitch that caused the outages was termed "embarrassing". The blog post ends with a promise ensuring that a problem like this will never happen again. We believe you Google. This time we really do!

Source: techtree