For those out there wondering what happened yesterday with all things Google, they experienced a system error that caused a bit of pain for around an hour. My wonderful France Telecom/Orange ISP crashed earlier in the day for an hour so I initially thought it was that painful service (thankfully it expires in 2.5 months, hooray!) but no, it was Google, again. (Google crashed a few months ago as well for a few hours.) The difficulty is that when you are such a global company, everyone is looking at every second of the day. Banks and other companies go down (even 99.9% leaves 44 minutes down per month) but unless it happens during key trading hours, they are rarely noticed. Pretty darned good, but not perfect.
Google Inc. is blaming this morning's Google Apps service outage on a system error that caused a major traffic jam.
The company reported that the outage, which started a little before 11 a.m. EDT, caused about 14% of Google users to face slow service or interruptions. The problem affected all Google products, including Google Search, Google News, Gmail, Google Maps and Google Reader.
The outage appeared to start clearing up a little after noon EDT.
