Mountain View, California — It was an extremely bad news day for Google Inc.’s online news site on Tuesday, as Google News, the company’s popular news aggregation service, experienced disruptions for roughly two hours, this was the second major outage to affect the company in a month.
“Today, from about 12:25 p.m. to 2:20 p.m. PDT, many users experienced difficulties accessing Google News,” a Google spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.
“We are aware of the issue and working to fix it,” wrote spokesman Chris Gaither. “We know how important Google News is to our users, and we take issues like this very seriously.” This issue has now been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Google’s spokesperson declined to provide further technical detail about the cause of the outage. When Google News went down, users turned to Twitter to spread the word and to look for information about the problem. One Twitterer wrote, “wow. google news is indeed down. 503 error.” Another tweeted, “Google News seems to be down… Oh my God… what is HAPPENING?! How are we to know?!”
Web site maintenance problems are generally a common issue. Google is not the only company having Web troubles this week. On Monday, Facebook said problems in its network had caused a variety of problems for users trying to access its services.
Users were unable to log in or view profiles, and in some cases reported that their posts disappeared. Facebook blamed its problems on “database and caching problems.” Those issues have since been resolved.
Google news hosted 16.4 million unique visitors in the United States in August, according to comScore. That would nominate it among the top 10 news websites in the United States, although comScore said it groups Google’s news site as a search site, not a news site.
Yahoo Inc is the No. 1 news site in the United States, according to comScore.
It is only the most recent outage by a large web property over the past few months. Earlier this month, a majority of Google’s Gmail web-based email users were unable to access its service for more than an hour. Google said the outage was due to some of its routers becoming overloaded during a routine upgrade of certain servers.
The problem, which began with intermittent disruptions, extensively ran into a second day with delays and outages. Google did not report what caused the Gmail problem.
Google did gave any immediate explanation for the Google News outage as well.