Mountain View, California — Google Inc.’s search engine suffered a widespread crash for several hours, when a technical glitch rendered the web search company’s Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Analytics, YouTube, AdSense, and Blogger experienced sluggish or unavailable to millions of users across the globe for about an hour Thursday morning.
The technical glitch rippled across the Internet, not only hampered the company’s hugely popular home page but also affected Gmail, its email service, sparking frustration among many and causing others to ponder their increasing reliance on the world most widely used Web property.
People across the globe reported a slowdown, and the matter became one of the day’s most talked about on Twitter within the hour, with the phrase “googlefail” as one of the most searched for terms.
Google has apologized for a routing error that slackened its services for a while and, in some cases, went down entirely. Google’s Urs Hoelzle said the error sent about 14 percent of the site’s Web traffic to Asia, where it ran into a traffic jam. Google affirmed the outage, and assured users that it was working on the matter, and the issue was resolved by mid-afternoon Eastern time.
Disruptions were also noted on Google News, Google Maps and the Google Calendar, all of which operated with varying degrees of success in various locations around the world.
Google explained the outage in a blog post comparing it to an airplane flight.
“Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia,” said Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president of operations at Google. “And a bunch of other planes were sent that way, too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took so much longer than expected.”
That is basically what some Google users encountered, according to the company, beginning at 10:48 a.m. Eastern time.
According to a blog post reporting at 12:15 p.m. PDT, Hoelzle attributed the problem to a traffic bottleneck.
“An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our Web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam,” he said. “As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We have been working hard to make our services ultrafast and [always on], so it is especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We are very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we will be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem would not happen again.”
The service breakdown follows similar blunder for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company that have affected businesses and consumers in recent months and raised questions about the reliability of Web-based software. In February, Google mail users around the world were locked out of their accounts for up to 24 hours after the company introduced new software that triggered a bug in the email program’s code.
“The issue affecting some Google services has been resolved,” a Google spokesperson said in an e-mail. “We are sorry for the inconvenience, and we will share more details soon.”
Because Gmail has a large user base. Between December 2007 and December 2008, the number of unique monthly visitors in the U.S. increased 43 percent from 20.8 million to 29.6 million, according to Internet tracking firm comScore, and even a breakdown affecting a small percentage of its audience can have a major impact.
A last similar Gmail outage occurred earlier this month, when the service was inaccessible for a limited number of users for about 20 minutes.
Also, Google’s search engine accounts for more than nine billion monthly search requests in the United States alone.
To ensure it retains its current domination of the market, which in turn attracts advertising revenue, the firm has spent billions of dollars to create a vast network of computers to lessen the chances of breakdowns.
However, not everyone was discouraged by the collapse of the colossus.
A spokesman for rival Microsoft’s Live Search said: “Sympathies to the Google servers. Happens to everyone. But this is why the world needs more than one search engine.”
A Google UK spokesman declined to say how badly the British operations had been affected.