Google outage still way better than Twitter

May 14, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments | |

Uptime is something most Internet users don’t actively think about. Yet they instinctively respond to it. One reason so many Web searchers use Google is it’s always there. Always available. Always delivering results.

Until this morning. Many Google websites were unreachable from around 7:45 A.M. Pacific until 9:20 A.M. The outage was widespread. PC World confirmed it affected France, Australia and China.

You can follow the popular reaction on Twitter by searching for #googlefail and leaving the results window open.

ZD’s Larry Dignan got his "resident IT guru" to run some tests . "It does appear Google is stopped at the AT&T border," he concluded. When Google came back online, Dignan continued to report network packet loss in connections to Google sites, a sort of intermittent failure that makes a website seem slow.

But many of Dignan’s readers didn’t buy the AT&T theory. One wrote , "Abovenet routes straight to SJC [Google's San Jose cluster of high-speed servers.] So it’s not just an AT&T issue."

The outage pointed out something nearly all Internet users take for granted: Google is almost never unreachable. A 90-minute glitch would be considered normal at Twitter. A Google outage is as rare as a Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction.

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About the Author, Paul Boutin

Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • i hate it when people compare google with twitter. twitter is so superficial that noone misses its content while it's down. google is so much more important.
  • The Google trust has been broken.
    The trust that been build up over 12 years.
    It will require significant marketing efforts and expenses to build up the trust again.