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.