Google’s Recent Problems

I have had trouble numerous times the past few days with Gmail, several times I couldn’t get on at all, I don’t think the chat has connected for me for days, widespread reports of Google Analytics not updating, mine are updated, but I didn’t look to be sure yesterday or this morning. Search Engine Roundtable has reported that Google Finance was down and before that, Google News was having trouble, I saw one screenshot that only had the headers and images, meaning it was probably database related. So what is going on? Google has been renowned for their capacity and ability to handle traffic, lots and lots of traffic. So what could the problems be? Hardware is distributed over lots of inexpensive servers, so that really shouldn’t be it, it seems more likely that something big has happened to their bandwidth, like a line, or 100, being cut somewhere, or something internally to their databases or web servers.

No notice, as far as I can see, has been posted by Google anywhere, so we are left in the dark. Michael Arrington from Techcrunch says even a small outage for Google is felt across the country and he is right.

It appears that the outages have affected a subset of Google’s servers and only those servers that are responsible for collecting analytics data and serving both Finance and Gmail for some users. Despite the huge capacity that Google has, and with plans for multiple new large datacenters across the country - they still at times experience outages on some of their services. Google is so big and so popular that even the slightest outage or problem is felt across the web. Since becoming open to all for registration for free, Google Analytics has become a very popular service, especially amongst bloggers. A quick scan of Technorati or Google Blogsearch results shows a large number of bloggers who have been reporting the outage in the past few hours. Source: Google Flatlines Again

Just goes to show you, there is NO such thing as 100% uptime on the web, no one is bullet proof.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels February 2007

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