Web Security News

Google News crashes, was Google hacked?

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Something went wrong with Google News on Thursday morning, causing the website to go down for several hours. Google acknowledged the outage in a statement on Thursday.

"Earlier today, Google News was temporarily unavailable for many users from approximately 3:30 a.m. until around 7 a.m. Pacific Time. This issue has now been resolved," the company said, according to CNET News.

"We know how important Google News is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously," Google said. "We apologize to those users who were affected."

The company did not divulge details of what went wrong, which meant IT blogs and web users were speculating about how the mighty Google could have been hacked.

The Google News site was down Thursday morning for users in Boston, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, Texas and Sarasota, Florida, but worked for one user in London, CNET News reported.

On Twitter, a steady stream of users reported not being able to access other Google services, including the search engine, Gmail and Blogger.

Last week, hackers temporarily seized control of the domain name for Google Morocco. A hacker or group of hackers calling themselves PAKbugs posted graffiti on the site.

TechCrunch reported that the hackers found a way into NIC.ma, which controls the DNS for the country, and targeted the Google domain name especially.
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