Who Pulled the Plug?

We don’t realize how much we rely on a service until it’s unavailable.

Did any Slaw readers get affected by the Google outage?

The headline in Information Week read:

Gmail, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Analytics, YouTube, AdSense, and Blogger experienced outages Thursday morning, according to discontented Twitter users.

Here is the statement:

“Earlier today, Google News was temporarily unavailable for many users, from approximately 3:30 AM until around 7:00 AM, Pacific Time. This issue has now been resolved. We know how important Google News hit is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”

“The issue affecting some Google services has been resolved. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and we’ll share more details soon.”

An outage that at first appeared to only affect Google News on Thursday also hit other Google Services like Gmail and Search, spreading panic across the Web – and Twitter, of course.

About two hours ago 12:15 p.m. PDT, Google senior VP of engineering Urs Hoelzle attributed the problem to a traffic bottleneck.

“An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our Web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam,” he said. “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. ”

Another report added that users on both coasts of the U.S. as well as in nations such as China, Australia, and France all reported problems.

“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,” Hoelzle says.