Yesterday Google managed to cause the world’s largest ever traffic jam. However, we are not talking about trouble on the roads, but internet traffic. Due to a technical glitch, yesterday thousands of people were almost cut off from the internet. What happened to Google?
Yesterday Google’s search engine, email service (GMail) and news services experienced technical problems. Some say that the servers crashed. This caused a knock-on effect to millions of other websites, including Google’s YouTube, which was useless for hours.
Some people were even unable to access their online bank accounts as Google Analytics software (for website owners to monitor site use) failed, and rather than allowing the page requests to skip the analysis, they just froze.
Google provided an explanation; “An error 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.”
The Google traffic jam started at about 14:30hrs, which is a busy time online. The Brits have had their lunch, and are surfing for something else to do other than work, and the Americans are waking up and checking their blogs and getting their news reports.
However, should wee be surprised that this happened? It is really quiet impressive that there are not more problems like this on the internet now. Many web hosts suffer temporary outages, but these are only seen my a minority of users. For Google, with its code embedded into so many websites, it reminds us how good they really are.
Google has apologised for all the inconvenience caused, and I trust them to learn from their mistakes, and use this as an opportunity to direct some of their best developers to improve the infrastruture.
Did you have a problem accessing the internet yesterday? Let us know.
