The NewsDemon Blog

After an initial service outage on Thursday, Google was dealt with another service outage this Monday morning which impacted users around the world. Beginning around 8:30AM, the primary Google service, Google News, had been inaccessible to many users, generating a “503 Server Error”.

The first outage on Thursday had already resulted in paniced users, including Usenet newsgroup users who also felt the affect as Google Groups was also down for the hour and a half it was reported being down. The net result was that not only did five percent of the traffic disappear, but it also jammed the rest of the web, as it slowed to a crawl. In a recent official company blog post, Google said that an error in one of its  systems caused it to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. It claimed that only 14 per cent of its  users experienced slow services or even interruptions.

Traffic would have fallen even more if the outage had been wider, as it affected just 14 percent of Google’s users. Analysts said the outage demonstrated exactly how reliant the world has become on Google, which now handles nearly three out of four search queries in America each day. Google Groups, which many had considered a stable source of accessing Usenet, was also compromised.

The outage happened after Google accidentally routed online traffic through Asia, creating a massive backup. The slowdown peaked around mid-afternoon in Europe and morning in the US, affecting millions of users.

Usenet newsgroups lit up throughout the morning with comments and complaints about the outage and the company.

”An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our Web traffic through Asia,” Google said.

“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.”

The disruption prevented users around the world from loading Google Group newsgroup pages, but the problems were in scattered areas. The outage was been reported by users from California to Massachusetts and as far away as Sydney, Australia, India, and the United Kingdom.

Although today’s outage is still being determined, only Google News has been reported to be affected this time around, versus the suite of applications and services affected at the end of last week.