Google Reader Suffers Down Time

This outage has lasted at least 4 hours by my count, starting late Sunday, and it’s nearly 3 a.m. Pacific now. I noted that shortly before 2 this morning. (Is Google Reader Down Overnight?)

Of note, I think the first two URLs you’re using refer to market share reports and not the outage.

Duncan, I use Google Reader AND I still use Bloglines, too. (Like you, I suspect, I was a heavy Bloglines user and then switched to Google Reader as a system preferable to Bloglines.) One advantage of Bloglines is the option to set up RSS feeds that search within my feeds. For example, one of my public blogrolls, http://www.bloglines.com/public/DSL has over 600 feeds, but I have numerous RSS feeds that search within these feeds. This is a GREAT feature for getting info from trusted sources, but sources that can’t realistically be scanned on a regular basis. Let’s face it, there’s way too much garbage when searching all feeds. Trusted, proven sources are a much better way to search.

All of this being said, there is a much, much better solution: Omea Pro. It’s fantastic, is extremely powerful, makes Google Reader and Bloglines look second rate. And it’s free. It’s an offline reader, but (of course) can also be used online. Much cleaner than either Google Reader or Bloglines, no limitations like with Google Gears for offline reading, great clipping and annotation features in Firefox (probably in IE, too), making it like Google Reader + Clipmarks (and much more) all-in-one. Doesn’t have a social networking feature, but with all the other goodies, it’s vastly superior to what either Google Reader or Bloglines offer.

http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/

I’d challenge anyone to use it and then tell me that they really prefer Google Reader. If they said that they do, I’d suspect that they’re lying — that’s how much better Omea Pro is. Some may say one of the other offline readers is better, but I haven’t found this to be the case and I’ve used at least a dozen (and within the past six months). Omea Pro isn’t perfect, but it’s the best reader on the market. And free is a good price, too.

http://www.interactions20.com/

Yes, I’m not getting any feeds in NZ from GR. I checked on Technorati and it’s coming through ok there, so it’s definitely GR. Last feed received 7 hours ago.

I noticed the lag when my firefox livebookmarks don’t tally with what I’m seeing on Greader. Had this issue for a week now, usually spanning 1-3 hours lag with the original site. Then again I’m based in the AustraliAsia region.

This is awful news. And if it wasn’t for me finding this piece of news elsewhere, I wouldn’t have known that TC wrote about it.

My entire browsing is through Google Reader (12.000 items a month), so I really need it now…

Well I can’t work today. I never realized how important RSS is until now.

Hell I don’t even know the sites I visit anymore since I just read the text in Google Reader usually.

I got up early for nothing!

There are a lot of readers out there that you can run on your own server: MonkeyChow, Gregarius, Feed On Feeds, etc. These will give you your own uptime reliability and let you update feeds whenever you want. Some have just about the same feature set, too.

These outages Google keeps having are a nonstarter for me.

Stefan
tell me about it. It’s been 4+ hours as I write this comment (7pm my time +8GMT), its bloody hard

I never used Google Reader though i am heavy user of Google search engine.
I use NETVIBES which is far superior then Google Reader. I visit Techcrunch Rss every 15 min to see the update. I never miss single article of TC. GReader is not so customizable as compared to Netvibes. Big boys concentrate less on this type of tiny most use full Tool which is used frequently like we breath - I mean there should be no suffocation in the tool like the one happened , right now, in Google reader. RSS reader plays an important role in Web 2.0 like water to human being.

Thanks for the link through Duncan

I have just updated my stats to compare what was the situation 4 months ago, and how it is currently.
Google reader market share based on my small but growing sample size has actually increased.

This downtimes kill me :’(

These Google Reader troubles join problems that occurred a few months ago with Google Analytics.

No feeds being updated in Spain either …… at least for 6 hours now …..

A new bumper sticker “addicted to RSS” would suit a lot of us who feel like lost every time google reader has a hiccups.

It is strange there is no 24/7 emergency teams in google to check this and wake up the teams when it turns wrong. It’s maybe because it is still on the lab.

It figures that I would choose to run an article about a Google Reader Widget for Mac OS X this morning. http://macapper.com/2007/06/25.....otifier-2/

I strongly prefer an offline reader anyway, though I wish there was a sort of IMAP for RSS feeds. Maybe I just thought of a mashup?

All Rights Reserved…

7 hours and counting, still no feeds.

Gah! GReader being down is baaaad… Nothing here in the UK all day. How am I going to keep up with the bazillion items I’ll get when it (finally) does come back up. Meh.

In India here. Been down over 8 hours. On the upside, my productivity has doubled..

=)

Chill out. View this an an unexpected ‘Day without Reader’ experiment. Go for a walk, talk to your partner, read a book or play a board game with your kids.

Take it from me. The world is still spinning and will be when GR service is restored.

It not be true at all, but I think the entire Google RSS system is broken because the Techdirt feed on my iGoogle page has also not been updated, while the blog has two updates.

Anyone else agrees?

Goyal
iGoogle feeds are pulled via Reader so yes, both would be down.

Google Reader is still down for me as of this morning 7:42am Central Time.

Yeah I agree with Goyal, it seems the whole system is down. I haven’t received fresh feeds in ages, and I’m in South Africa!

Use NetNewswire !

Very sorry about this, feeds should be correctly refreshing again, they will catch up over the next few hours.

Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer

I noticed this bit lately this morning. I kept on refreshing google reader for a while looking for new feed. No luck, only came to know abt the issue via TC. I;m glad I have TC feed in my Firefox

hmm, do I have to run a proxy to post here now, oh well.

I kept on seeing google reader but no new feeds, so i doubted and came directly to Techcrunch. Glad you posted this

Has no one noticed that the update to Safari has broken ‘j’ ‘k’ and also that email this is not connected to your gmail contacts. What is going on. Is it an update to get safari working better with iphone. I bet it is.

On my linux machine everything works and on mac camino everything works except mail addresses don’t pop up

Ideas??

@duncan
if rss is an essential part of your workflow, you should consider a desktop reader like netnewswire or newsfire. they don’t experience downtime, more customizable, and unlike google reader, you can search through the items, and even make smart groups (à la iTunes). you can also set the period between feed refresh.

I use both newsfire (for personal) and greader (for professional) and find newsfire much better than google reader

I use newsfire also but have grown to use google reader almost exclusively for anywhere use

@heri
I’m waiting on my first ever Mac to be delivered, I’ll try out some Mac RSS readers when I get it, I’ve never found anything that works for me well under Windows.

was someone killed?

it’s a free application for god’s sake, there are humans involved, many things could go wrong.

It seems the feeds are refreshing now. I’m getting new feed now.!

Wow, to all who said their work depends on Google Reader:

I’m curious. What do you do that your work depends on gReader?

I can live with having to wait a few hours for new items, but I can’t access my starred items - all stuff that appeared long before this outage occurred. What’s up with that?

As of 12:05 EST (Boston), my Google Reader has stopped returning any results. Lots of unread items in my left-hand subscriptions column, but all I get when I attempt to access them is “Your reading list is empty.” Sigh.

Hey Duncan, its good to hear from you! (just discovered that you are writing on TechCrunch)

My feeds are down as well, and I have just realized how much I depend on Google Reader.

Hopefully this will be resolved soon, but I guess it will give me some other non-related blogging items to finish up on.

Take care.

I kind of find it odd that there is a story post on TechCrunch about Google Reader being down. Big deal…it’s back up now.

These things happen.

For most, Google Reader is not mission critical. That said, I’d never trust my email to gmail, since that is mission critical.

this impacted my iGoogle (google.com/ig) feeds as well, although some feeds did update and some didn’t there. Some still haven’t.

It’s been up and down all day now. Really annoying, though I admit not “mission critical.”

- to be honest / I think RSS / is way old / and ATOM is the next bigger better thing.

-RB

p.s. Let the stupid responses begin

GReader now loads, but the feeds are obviously not updating.

This problem underscores that online RSS readers are by no means perfect. I wish Newsgator would get its act together and improve the reliability and useability of its online reader, because I think if it worked properly it would be a viable alternative to Google Reader. I like Bloglines o.k., but its style is cheesy and you can’t adjust the volume on its embedded mp3 player.

I’ve also noticed Newsgator online refreshes feeds faster than Google Reader.

It’s highly ironic to me that as more traditionally desktop-based apps are migrating online (i.e. Zoho, Google Docs), offline RSS readers still dominate the market.

I think it’s funny that everyone is giving Google such a pass on this. If this were Yahoo, people would be out of their minds, screaming about how Y! has lost it and their engineering sucks and so forth..

This is certainly the last thing you’d expect from a company like Google.

When are we getting back to normal updates? I have more than a couple feeds that got 1 update ~8 hours ago and promptly stopped getting any more updates right after that instead of the usual 1 hour updates.

I remember when I used to use Bloglines. The reason I did switch to Google Reader is because I always saw that damn Bloglines plumber. Google of course had a lot less downtime than Bloglines did. I even expect hiccups to happen even at the biggest of companies. I never seem to use offline readers because I switch computers too often and it’s just too much of a hassle.

Was it a US only issue because it was working for me fine in Australia at the time the reported outages were occuring?

Look, if you’re addicted to a specific feed or group of feeds, there are plenty of alerting services. (I won’t even mention Twitter.) I like ZapTXT, but I won’t claim it’s necessarily superior as I did claim that Omea Pro is the best reader (which it is).