Misrouted Traffic Blamed For Google Outage

Google now says a traffic routing error caused the massive outage dubbed as #googlefail Thursday morning.

All Google services, ranging from Gmail to the main Google Search page, were unavailable to users worldwide for a period of 60 to 90 minutes. Google SVP of Operations Urs Hoelzle has posted the following explanation to the Official Google Blog:

This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern…

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.