Google Explains The Downtime

As I posted about earlier, Google experienced a bit of downtime and slowdowns mainly throughout the United States. Below is a excerpt from the Google blog explaining what exactly happened to bring about this occurrence.

Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. 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, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and “always on,” so 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. All planes are back on schedule now.

Unfortunately I was among that 14% of people affected by the routing issues. Thankfully however, it all seems to be sorted now. We can all now go back to our regularly scheduled flights.