"Traffic jam" glitch brings Google grinding to a halt

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 15 May 2009 at 08:40

Google has blamed a "traffic jam" for the service outage that affected millions of users yesterday.

Google says the glitch affected around 14% of its global users, and brought all of its services including Gmail, search and apps grinding to a halt.

"Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia," explains Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president for operations on the Google blog.

"And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That's basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour. An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam," he says.

Google confirmed that the glitch also hit services such as Google Analytics, which is used by third party sites to record traffic figures to their sites. This led to some sites taking much longer to open than normal.

The company has now apologised for the glitch: "It's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. 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," wrote Hoelzle.

Microsoft's Search Team took the chance to warn of the dangers of becoming overly dependent on Google: "Sympathies to the Google servers. Happens to everyone. But this is why the world needs more than one search engine," wrote Betsy Aoki, Live Search's program manager on its Twitter page.