Earlier today, Google users experienced a massive fail whale. Gmail was down, search was slow, Google Reader, YouTube and image search were all sporadic. Even Google Analytics and non-Google sites with AdSense ads were reporting issues. Of course, most of the complaints could be found on Twitter. If you do a search for “Gmail down” or “Google down”, you will still find a storm of chatter.
If you go to Twitscoop, you can get a graph of the serach activity for terms such as “gmail” and “google.” They rose up and peaked about an hour ago, and now are coming back down again. Come to think f it, that graph looks a lot like a whale. I guess it is appropriate that Google would get its own fail whale via Twitter.
For what it’s worth, a Google spokesperson confirms: “We’re aware some users are having trouble accessing some Google services. We’re looking into it, and we’ll update everyone soon.” I find that statement to be amazingly information-free. I guess I’ll just keep searching Twitter until Google gets around to updating everyone.
Update!: From Google: “The issue affecting some Google services has been resolved. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and we’ll share more details soon.” Again, thanks, but we know that already, seeing as how Gmail is back up and everything.
I do not know if this is only me…For quite some time now, I have seen that all my Google sites, including adwords.com and the clicks on Google search results take such a long time to load on my Firefox browser. They load in a flash on Chrome though..
Was just wondering if Google is going it deliberately on Firefox to kill its market share..
No, no..Google can’t be evil..
Noticed this too sporadically over the past couple of months.
Its scary how much I depend on Google for my work. I was in the middle of trying to get a map and directions and then maps would not load. I went to check my analytics for my sites and could not log in. I had an important email sent to my gmail account which I rarely use and couldnt log in there either. Then I tried using the basic search to compare a few things and had to resort to yahoo. I dont know if I have used yahoo in a decade for searching and frankly wasnt impressed with the results. What was weird with google search was that it would sometimes barely work but once showed 3 results and the other time just a single result. Crazy when it goes down though especially when I am trying to get stuff done here.
For a moment I was thinking it was just our network. . . glad to see this post!
Just read on Twitter that Obama became the first black president…
Whaaaat? I’ll believe that when main stream media like CNN or FOX News report it.
It seems to have been local; I haven’t noticed anything at all, while I was using Google Analytics and their search…
Yeah, nothing out of the ordinary on my end…
I dont think its resolved 100%. Youtube is still not connecting to the server properly and I am trying to upload a video there using animoto.com
This should have been a story about Google having outtages, but you had to find a way to drool over Twitter too. The world could be ending in 12 hours and your story would be “How Twitter Will Emerge #1 One Social Site After End of World”
One day twitterfree, is that too much to ask?
When I can find more information about the outage on Twitter than from Google itself, yes, that becomes the story.
It doesn’t matter actually where your source of information comes from…
You don’t write all day “watched my inbox, opened my mail, deleted some spam, came across this info” do you??
I have to agree with others, this is a pretty bizarre context to bring in Twitter, considering all the posting you do about Twitter on this blog. This is coming from a reader who has NEVER complained about your level of Twitter coverage.
I’m just sayin’.
Hey Eric, I want to introduce to different methods of communication online. From what I’ve read so far, I think you only see Twitter as the sole means of communication with others.
Today’s lesson : forums.
Forums – or “messageboards” – people start these things called “threads” (or “topics”) and people have a conversation. The technology’s been around since newsgroups – oh that would go back to the 80s. Anyway, you should check them out one day. There’s “only” millions of them in existance on the web, some general chat, some niche.
In my next lesson to you, I will introduce IM, or instant messaging. Further on, we’ll look at email and how people communicate via the POP3 and SMTP protocols. Finally we may move onto VOIP, but that’s for advanced students.
During this time I ran a traceroute and saw that all my google traffic was routing through Tokyo Japan. I live in California so that was a problem. I checked later and the routing changed back to US only hops. I wonder if the problem was that some router services were hacked?
I guess now it’s been resolved, I badly hope that Google in trying to introduce Twitter like features doesn’t get infected by its Fail Whale~
ha, so much for that article bragging about switching to gmail. Ill stay on yahoo with no downtime and better features.
I’m in Morgan Hill, CA and noticed the outage. Sites we design and developed were also getting affected because they were linking out to analytics, apis, etc.
So that wasn’t good at all.
I didn’t realize how many things connected to them, haha. Kinda scary.
I’ve been using Google products all day (Gmail, YouTube, Reader) and haven’t had any problems at all.
why must you always have twitter searchs in the article? it has no significance whatsoever.
why does it matter if people are talking about google down on twitter..its not any different from people talking about it on blogs.
nice one yaar
Google has become the “natural” monopoly, not by coercion but by people’s choice, as suggested by an article I read recently but forgot the source. Now we really need to make use of some viable alternatives.
What sucks was I couldn’t Google why Google was down, I didn’t know where to look for answers…..oh wait Twitter!
I just wanted to plug that in there since this site rarely mentions Twitter.
Funny thing .. if I haven’t read this post from Techcrunch I would even notice that Google was down this morning. I have been working with it and everything seemed normal.
Anyway, this only proofs how powerful Twitter is.
This is getting really old. Any time any newsworthy event happens — any terror strike, earthquake, election, whatever — TC posts an article about news appearing on Twitter. WE GET IT.
STFU about twitter already. at least keep the talk abotu twitter in the fucking hundreds of shits u write abotu it. fuck this site, im never coming back its a POS with al lthis twitter shit
Awww…your unique perspective on punctuation and spelling will be missed.
Is there any theory about Google voluntarily failing to better prove that they aren’t a monopoly?
It’s my understanding that it was actually an issue with Level 3 routing rather than Google itself. I experienced no outages of Google search or Gmail myself.
Clearly the way Google governs our lives nowadays, a few moments without Google is so hard to get through!
So, when Google buys Twitter and Google goes down, we’ll just learn about the outage on Twitter and… oh, what’s that, you say?
ANUS WHALE
This does not look like a whale at all