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Google Suffers Another Outage, Doesn't Explain Why

by Terrence O'Brien on May 15, 2009 at 06:11 PM

Google Suffers Another Outage, Doesn't Explain WhyYou may have missed it, but if you were one of the unlucky people caught in the Google outage yesterday, it may have seemed like the world was ending. At about 7:48 a.m. Pacific time yesterday morning, a glitch of an unspecified nature caused some traffic for Google services (including search, Gmail, and News) to be needlessly rerouted through Asia. The mistake caused slow downs and service interruptions for roughly 14-percent of customers, according to Google.

This isn't the first time that Google has had problems with its services going down, and the ensuing global freak-outs only underscore our reliance on the search giant and its collection of Web-based applications.

Security firm McAfee initially attributed the outage to Google's slow migration from IPv4 to IPv6, which is a new system for assigning Internet addresses. ComperWorld writer Steven Vaughn-Nichols told Reuters that he believes that the outage may have been the result of a denial-of-service attack perpetrated by hackers. (!!!)

Google has denied both scenarios, but has not come forward about the exact nature of the glitch that left some users in Google limbo for about an hour yesterday -- Google's uncharacteristically mum response, of course, is encouraging random speculation. By that token, we're claiming with certainty that the outage was the doing of renegade Internet gnomes. That, or the Sith. [From: Official Google Blog, CNET, and Reuters]

Tags: gmail, google news, GoogleNews, outage, search, top

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