Google News was down again Friday morning, signaling an apparent ripple effect through its servers that continues to affect users.
Google has apologized for Thursday’s glitch, calling it a “traffic jam” that caused many users to experience slow service and service interruptions on Google.com, Gmail and Google News. The sites, as well as Google Docs, AdSense, YouTube, Google Analytics, and Blogger, were unavailable to some users for about an hour.
Specifically, Google said the trouble stemmed from a glitch that routed too much of its traffic through computers in Asia. This glitch translated to 14 percent of its users feeling the pain of an overwhelmed Google server.
“For so many users on PCs, it’s the gateway to the Internet,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “While technical problems occur from time to time, people essentially expect perfection from Google. In addition to any frustration caused to ordinary users, there’s also a big PR cost to downtime for Google because of its visibility.”
Google’s Outage History
This is hardly the first issue Google has had with reliability. Google experienced a one-two punch in February when a data-center malfunction caused Gmail to go down for hours in conjunction with routine maintenance at a European site.
Google explained that Gmail accounts are typically served out of another data center during maintenance, but some coding issues caused an overload that cascaded from one data center to another for about an hour before Google engineers corrected the issue.
While Google was scrambling to fix the problem, attackers launched phishing campaigns in the Google Talk chat service. When users clicked a link to “check out” a video, they were sent to a site called ViddyHo and asked for their Gmail username and password. Users who gave the information set off a chain reaction that sent a similar message to their…