Google Flatlines Again
Nick Gonzalez
63 comments »
This morning it appears that a number of Google services are having problems. We first noticed last night when our Google Analytics account wasn’t reporting any new data since 9am yesterday, but Analytics is often notoriously slow in receiving updates. This morning there were no further updates with our Analytics data, and in addition to that we have heard reports that both Google Finance and Gmail were and still are also having problems. Below is a screenshot of the Techcrunch stats from Google Analytics from yesterday, showing the sudden drop in hits being recorded.
It appears that the outages have affected a subset of Google’s servers and only those servers that are responsible for collecting analytics data and serving both Finance and Gmail for some users. Despite the huge capacity that Google has, and with plans for multiple new large datacenters across the country - they still at times experience outages on some of their services. Google is so big and so popular that even the slightest outage or problem is felt across the web. Since becoming open to all for registration for free, Google Analytics has become a very popular service, especially amongst bloggers. A quick scan of Technorati or Google Blogsearch results shows a large number of bloggers who have been reporting the outage in the past few hours.
Search Engine Roundtable was amongst the first to report the issue with Google finance (see the screenshot below, courtesy of their post)
GigaOm is also reporting the outages, and as yet there has been no official word from Google nor from any of the Google blogs or bloggers. Analytics has been affected for more than 24 hours now, the other problems seem random. If you have any news on any other outages to other Google services, or if you know what went wrong, leave a comment here. We will continue to try to find out what has happen and to get an official word from Google.
Update: It seems that other Google services are also down, namely Google News (story and screenshot at Google Blogoscoped) and users having problems with Blogger (from our comments below, see the error page here). The Google Analytics blog has a post that says the system is down for maintenance, and that users should be able to see a full update of all their date ‘by the end of the day’ (assuming they mean west cost USA time). As of 6:40pm there is still no data being collected in Analytics.
Andrew Girdwood, who works with a publisher that is in Google News, reports that referrals from Google News have come to a standstill, greatly affecting traffic to their site. This blog has a timeline of the issues at Blogger, with a screenshot.
It seems that a lot of different services are affected, Analytics is down for everybody but with Gmail, Blogger, Finance and News we aren’t sure how many users are affected or were affected. Our latest check shows all of these services being live (although slow at time - very ungoogly)
Update2: As of 7pm PST Google Analytics appears to be up with data restored for TechCrunch, but others are still experiencing blackouts.
I guess I wasn’t imagining things then. I noticed an outage on Blogger as well.
Yeah, blogger seems to be having random problems, as does my “customized homepage”.
What’s that? We want Google to be our next OS?
Goog has posted the issue on thier blog..
http://analytics.blogspot.com/
Has anyone had experience with Google Apps for your domain ( http://google.com/a/ ), sepcifically the mail? Is it reliable enough to move companies to?
Also does anyone know if it is seperate to the normal Gmail service? I’m guessing it is because the storage space doesn’t increase like the normal Gmail.
i’ve experienced problems doing google searches and using the google reader.
the error shows a “HTTP Status 404″ on “Apache Tomcat/5.5.16″…
Yeah, I use Google Apps for domain, specifically mail. It’s been down since before noon PST. For the most part it’s been reliable.
@Tim: I’m a big fan of GAYD also. I haven’t been able to use it for my latest site though, because any e-mails sent from my web server (for example the Contact Us form) would never get delivered. Everything else rocked, but I had to turn it off because I got no help from Support in fixing that problem.
Google Blogoscoped adds News to the list:
http://blog.outer-court.com/ar.....1-n22.html
I noticed when I logged into Gmail this morning (GMT) there was a notice that said something to the effect that all/some (can’t remember) Google services would could now be customizable(?) with information from Google Accounts, so maybe that’s something to do with the problems they’re having …?
@Mark - never heard the GAYD acronym before - it’s a goodie!
I heard anecdotal evidence today of Google Maps being affected.
I thought it was just happening to me. So I e-mailed their tech support asking what happened to my data. I knew there were visitors after it flatlined on me…at about 9a yesterday, just like it did you.
I’m experiencing a flatline in Google Analytics since about Thursday noon Pacific time.
Does the Gmail app in GAYD have ads or not? I don’t know how many companies would want to use it if it included ads.
Matt -
Gmail app in GAYD does have adds, it basically exactly the same as GMail but you get your domain name instead of gmail.com, besides that as far as i can tell it functions exactly the same.
I use it, and generally like it, but have some mixed feelings. My biggest problem is that you have to manually open two windows to be able to compose a message and look into your inbox, very annoying if you need to grab some text from a different email.
I think it is long overdue for an upgrade - especially if G wants business users who were raised on outlook.
I was waiting for this news to show up here. Just based on the sampling I’ve seen in poking around the net I assumed it was a pretty significant issue.
The annoying thing is the lack of communication from Google. I emailed support and got a form letter back explaining how to install analytics again. I then had to step through and explain that this was an OUTAGE and not an installation issue. All that got was “we’re aware of the problem and are working to fix it”
And another thing!
On Google docs the post to blog feature randomly stopped working last week for my wordpress blog.
See the thread on the support group others have experienced the same. I hope this is not some cheap ploy to make people move to blogger.
http://groups.google.com/group.....6c7735a78a
I’m sort of glad to hear this. I set analytics up on a site last night and was wondering why I wasn’t getting any sort of stat response. It said the standard “data is being collected” stuff, but no stats were actually appearing. I was seriously thinking it was just me until came across this.
I apologize to all for apparently breaking Google.
datter
http://www.datter.com
we were having problems too. I believe some of the problems can be traced to comcast or SBC. Lots of our clients couldn’t logon, but then they could, then they couldn’t, then they could. It also appeared at the same times…so I think someone was doing maintence or something.
i HAD PROBLEMS WITH GOOGLE ADSENSE DISPLAYING CHILD ADOPTION ADS ON MY FASHION SITE FOR THE LAST 4 DAYS…LOSING MONEY AND USER RESPECT BECAUSE OF NON-RELEVANT ADS! TRIED TO UPDATE WITH GOOGLE PING SERVICE=NOTHING!
I can’t believe people actually think Google is secure or stable enough to use for anything serious.
If Google was an OS, it would be less stable than Windows ME…
I suggest using Mint. It is an awesome tool. http://getamint.com
Oops, I’m stupid. http://haveamint.com sorry…
Google news was also down yesterday for more than 4 hrs.
I think the question is should we use two analytics packages simultaneously?
This might slow down the page load, but you would have access to your stats in situations such as this.
I was thinking of switching away from GA anyway because the stats arent up to the minute.
Just checked GA again. Its back online with no data loss (or so it seems).
Now, if only Techcrunch would get a server with a fraction of the grunt of any Google Server… This joint takes ages to load…. must be all that monitizing, analytics and dopey Snap roll overs.
All the data has appeared for me too - quite frankly for a free service, the odd delay getting results isn’t too bad. I don’t think I’ve ever had any data loss.
http://nz.bla.st/google/
Blogger is showing a message at the control panel “Schedule Outage at 11AM PST”
Ahh, so thats what the problem was. I have just spent ages searching through my pages checking that the google analytics code was there. It was and I couldn’t find any problems. It is nice to know that it wasn’t my fault
Along the lines of “analytics”, it seems that feedburner now has a site visit tracking feature in addition to rss feed statistics. I use Google Analytics myself but have thought of trying feedburner out.
@Jorge : LOL
Man, I wish I would have read this earlier. I was going nuts trying to figure out what was going on with Analytics. Thanks for bringing my sanity back.
Google Analytics is back. It seems that the data wasn’t lost.
Google Finance was down for me most of the day yesterday.
I work at a Harley-Davidson dealership and was going to use either Google or Yahoo finance to monitor the stock and news about the company’s strike.
It was the first time I had used Google finance. I thought the site was great, but obviously I was very disappointed by the outage.
By Friday, the first day of the lockout/strike, it was down for most of the day.
You guys should check out http://www.stockwrap.com - free program that pulls data from variety of sources.
Its great!
http://www.reinvigorate.net/ is starting to look really tasty.
not worth changing from goog analytics though.
hmm … need to checkout analytics
I have noticed that my google sitemaps at times loses data. I was told by google “this is normal”. Doesn’t seem to to me … google also lost track that my site had been “verified”.
I’ve also noticed lots of problems with gmail lately. A big plus for their apps is that they’re alway up.
When I logged into Google Analytics yesterday I was showing about a day and a half of no data but then when I logged in this morning it showed all the data…so good news is they seem to be collecting all the data but there was a long delay in reporting it.
GMAIL is dead for me right now.
I guess I was the first one to report the Google outage about Google news and other sites but alas
a blogger who isnt famous doesnt get the scoop !
Check this http://highheaven.blogspot.com.....oogle.html
Google analytics is dead for me right now at Sat 10:45am EST. No analytics at all, was working fine last night.
I am a Google analytics addict and have been in withdrawals for two days. It is back up now but still missing some data.
Good to hear about what happened. I was beginning to wonder why people stopped coming to see me.
Kinda funny how we talk about a Google outage like it’s a water or electrcity outage. If most other sites went down, we might say the site had “down time” but when Google goes down, it’s referred to as an “outage,” describing our loss rather than the site’s.
Just like we have BSOD to describe offline OS failures, we need a new acronym to describe these interweb system failures. How about “Google Online Operations Failure” (GOOF)?
My two cents about this post. http://worldandweb.blogspot.co.....d-for.html
How about we call it the “White Screen of Death”?
This has happened to me before — Google Analytics being messed up. Still, it seems to correct itself after awhile or at least I hope that it does.
No telling what goes on with it, but I am glad that I am not the only one with the problem. I thought I was losing it.
The problem has not corrected itself. our site gets usually on an average 35, 0000 sessions a day we are down to 25,000 for the last 4 to 5 days. Our google referral traffic has dropped.
And they want you to rely on them for office applications? Oooookaaaay. With Billions of dollars and they can’t keep the switch turned to “On”. Must be all those googlers that vested that just don’t care.
Maybe its all that energy sucked into taking down illegal videos, I mean YouTube, or I mean both really (after all what is YouTube without illegal videos…a dead napster?).
From the Great Northwest
I have had just about enough of these “server failures”. I have been a loyal Gmail user since Sept of 2005 and service is getting worse & worse every day, NOT better. Now lately, EVERY day at noon and 4-5PM I am unable to send or receive messages or even access my address book.
I have mail.yahoo as back-up, but all my accounts are connected to my gmail addy…..SOAKS!!!
I suspect that the chat program bundled with gmail has alot to do with these jam ups. I could give a flying, flaming, rats patootie about chat and want it removed but gmail support remains hidden to me. (URL please?….anybody?)
My guess is, If I am able to shutdown the chat side from trying to connect, then my mail will work a little faster. (yes?….No?)
I think Google overloaded their own servers with chat traffic that took up unexpected bandwidth.
I fingered it out. Switch to “Basic HTML” at the bottom of the page stops the chat from loading & connecting.
Well see if that puts a giddy-up in load times during peak hours.
Dee De Deeeee!
1 of our 7 Google Analytics profiles has been flat-lining since February 13. That’s more than 10 days, folks.
Oddly - though both share the same root - we’re getting stats on our Public Television site for WGBH Realty Perks: http://www.homegift.com/wgbh_private/Default.aspx but not on our corp site HomeGift.com: http://www.homegift.com
As Rob said in his Feb 2 comment (#16), “The annoying thing is the lack of communication from Google.” We too have submitted multiple support requests without getting any response - other than auto-responder emails saying that most inquiries are responded to within one business day.
I understand that Google has a lot on its plate right now - not the least of which is the launch of Google Apps. But if Google is going to replace Microsoft as the defacto Office Applications standard, they have to prove to serious business users that they can scale support and provide continuity of service.
I’m curious, are others still experiencing GA outages?
My bad. This was a self inflicted outage. Team member had inadvertently changed the account code suffix (profile number) while fixing an annoying IE message (“page contains both secure and non-secure items…). So in essence, the site WAS updating GA, but under another site’s profile.
Lessons learned: 1. don’t debug late at night. 2. don’t entrust the company jewels to free software – or if you do, don’t expect good support.