Web Security News

Google says 'traffic jam' caused crash

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Google's search engine and other services including Google News and Gmail went down on Thursday. The company said that an internal error caused the outage.

"An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam," Google's senior vice president of operations, Urs Hoelzle, said in a post on the Google blog. "As a result, about 14 percent of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions."

The company also acknowledged an outage affecting Google News earlier on Thursday, which it said was down for about three-and-a-half hours.

The Google News site was unavailable 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.

Google did not explain what caused the outage to Google News but said it had resolved the problem.

In January, a human inputting error caused Google to go down for about 40 minutes, when a Google employee accidentally typed a backslash ("/") for the whole URL of a malicious website, causing Google to block access to every site with a backslash in its URL, the Times of London reported.
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