Mountain View, California — Barely less than a week after suffering a large outage that impacted users around the world, a “Google News” aggregation site suffered another outage Monday morning, that affected an as-yet unknown number of users, within days after a traffic routing issue hampered several of the search engine giant’s main properties.
Google this morning acknowledged that its Google News news aggregation site went down between 8:35 a.m. EDT and 10 a.m. EDT today.
Some users trying to access the site have reported that they received a “503 Server Error” message and “Please try again in 30 seconds.” It is unclear how many users were affected or how wide a geographical area was affected.
Although some people were able to access Google News, but the site was not displaying pages correctly, or when links to other Google News categories were clicked, more “Server Error” messages appeared.
“Earlier today, Google News was temporarily unavailable for some users. This issue has now been resolved,” Google said in a statement. “We know how important Google News is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously. We apologize to those users who were affected.”
Starting at about 5:35 a.m. Pacific time, users were met with slower than expected service. By 6:25 a.m., that changed to 503 server errors — a problem that lasted until about 7 a.m. Pacific time, Google said.
The outage comes close on the heels of a much bigger breakdown last week that affected most Google products.
Google criticized a system error for service disruptions that took down many of its services, but it did not elaborate on what caused Monday morning’s problems.
During the last disruption, Google Search and Google News performance slowed to a crawl, while a full outage spread through a bundle of Google Apps products, from Gmail to Google Maps and Google Reader. Comments about the failure were flying on Twitter, and “googlefail” quickly became one of the most-searched terms on the popular micro-blogging site.
As was the case last week, users once again took to Twitter to vent their frustrations with Google News’ inaccessibility.
The company reported that the May 14 outage, which began a little before 11 a.m. EDT, caused about 14% of Google users to face slow service or interruptions.
Caroline Dangson, an analyst for IDC, said outages made her glad she is not dependent on Google Apps for her work.
“When we look at businesses dependent on Google Analytics or Gmail, they cannot afford to have Google crash on them,” she said. “It is bad for business. The enterprise will start to consider using something that is always on — more reliable. It is a problem when you have this kind of hiccup system-wide and you are not seen as dependable.”
The outage has been reported by users from California to Massachusetts and as far away as Sydney, Australia, India, and the United Kingdom. Twitter also lit up with users complaining of the outage.
There are no reported problems of Google News in some parts of the world, such as Tel Aviv, Israel. Other Google services, such as Google.com, Gmail, and YouTube appear to be working fine and are not affected. However, this latest Google stumble tarnishes, yet again, the company’s image as one of the most reliable Internet companies.
Access to Google News has been restored (9:50 a.m. EDT). Users are reporting that the service disruption to Google News, which lasted approximately 1.5 hours, is over.