Google goes down

US users suffer Gfail outage

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14 May 2009 17:32 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Although the Pocket-lint offices remain unaffected, it seems Google has gone "down" for many today.

Reports are still coming in, mainly via Twitter and blogs but also by email and more traditional news sources, but it seems that American users have been most affected.

YouTube, Google Reader, Blogger, Google Analytics, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Apps have all said to have suffered issues, while even Google search is described as very slow where it is working.

Some reports suggest that the problems are localised to certain areas in the States, and may stem from an AT&T technical issue.

No doubt Google will come forth soon with an explanation, but it will have to be a big apology to try and undo the PR damage such an outage causes.

UPDATE: Google has issued the following statement on its blog:

"Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That's basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

"An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and "always on," so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. 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. All planes are back on schedule now. "