18 May 2009 | Author: Yasmin Sulaiman

Google's Friday outage continues to cause concern

When you're a company that's as big and as powerful as Google, getting used to positive and negative news about your firm dominating the headlines in equal measure must be par for the course. Take last week, for instance: on Tuesday, Google hit a major roadblock when its Street View application was banned in Greece - a move that could have repercussions for the search engine in other countries around the world. Then on Wednesday, it was sweetness and light again as Google's Searchology 2009 press conference revealed some exciting modifications to search - read bigmouthmedia's Searchology recap for more details.

Friday, however, was to bring trouble with a technical glitch causing major traffic for users globally and initiating a general slowdown of millions internet sites of internet sites using Google services, like Analytics. The outage, which lasted for an hour from approximately 2.30pm GMT, has stimulated hot debates on several blogs and forums about Google's reliability and continued to dominate tech headlines over the weekend.

Here's the story so far: news about the Google outage first came to the fore when Twitter users began tweeting about how slow the search engine was being on Friday afternoon. Popular services like Google News and Gmail also slowed down; for Gmail, this was one of several outages this year, with a similar event in February leaving many personal and corporate users with email access for hours.

Google apologised for Friday's disruptions in a statement, saying: "An error caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14 per cent of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions.

"We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again."

But these assertions might not be much solace to Google's users and its advertising clients. Still fresh in the memory of many search engine users is Google's January glitch, when every site in the search engine's results pages was marked as potentially harmful and dangerous to computers. The effect was felt worldwide, as a bigmouthmedia article from the time detailed, but did not affect paid search results. What's more, the search engine's most recent outage has sparked off many rumours about the future of cloud computing, as the safety of virtualised resources is called into question.

So can Google's dominance survive another outage? With the search engine accounting for 77 per cent of search volume in the UK and 73 per cent in the US (according to Hitwise data), there's certainly a lot at stake. However, while the recent failures are unlikely to derail the search engine's popularity, the prevailing worries could cause much more of a backlash from Twitter users should the long-held rumour over Google's acquisition of the micro-blogging company ever come to pass (though Twitter is no stranger to downtime of much more epic proportions).

Nevertheless, as long as the innovations keep coming thicker and faster than the potential for outages, Google looks set to remain comfortably on its thrown for some time to come.

Home | Careers | RSS | Contact Us | Newsletter

International sites: