Google brought to its knees by internal error

by Stevie Smith - May 15 2009, 15:00

Considering how swift and reliable Google usually is, it came as something of a jarring shock yesterday when The Tech Herald suddenly found itself forced to use Yahoo’s service when Google Search inexplicably slowed to a sudden crawl.

Switching between different browsers garnered the same crawl, and refreshing our systems didn’t seem to make a difference either – so we were pretty sure the problem wasn’t related to our network. Thankfully, however, an official apology from Google met this morning’s office boot, which we’ll happily accept just as long as Google promises not to spook us again.

Yahoo was no fun, no fun at all.

Described as an online “traffic jam” by Google in its apology, yesterday’s temporary spate of sluggishness was not limited to the company’s market-leading search engine, also bringing Gmail and the Google News aggregator to a crawl for some users and all-but crippling them for others.

“An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our traffic through Asia,” explained a Google spokesman. “As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions.”

The online heavyweight also admitted its embarrassment regarding the faulty delivery, not least because Google has, it claims, been focused on working hard to make its services “ultrafast” and “always on”.

“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,” commented Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president of operations at Google.

This week’s crawling service follows on from an unrelated technical problem that resulted in Google Gmail account holders being unable to access the service for a number of hours in February of 2009, while the search engine was struck by a similar but glancing outage in January.

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