Digital Prank

How many of us can imagine a day without Google ? Web users have already given a taste of life without Google last night as the Internet Search Engine giant experienced some serious technical problems which took them out of service for couple of hours. Lot of bloggers have already dubbed this incident as ‘Great Google Failure 2009’, ‘GoogleFail’, 5/14 etc. Google experienced a similar failure sometime back in February which was popularly mocked as Gfail. Popular Google services including Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google News either performed sluggishly or unavailable to users from Europe and US affecting millions.

The outage existed for couple of hours at 12:48am Australian time and the slowdown peaked around morning in US, mid-afternoon in Europe. Arbor Networks which monitors the web usage said that traffic from Google servers to major North American Internet Service Providers plummeted from 15Gbps to 1Gbps. The outage has said to affected countries including Australia, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, France and China. Melbourne experienced the service outage but was restored in 30 minutes. Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Google Operations said,

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

Urs Hoelzle didn’t reveal what is the exact reason for the outage and of course they wont be.