Google Outage: When God of the Internet Took a Break!

“Google is God” is a quote I come across often since I became a blogger. If you are online, there is very little chance you do not know about Google or have not used the search engine. Managing several million search queries every hour effortlessly, we often take Google search engine for granted.

Today it seems the internet God, took a break giving 502 error for many users across the world. The outage has now been resolved and the search service is up and running.

Google_502_Error

A colleague (@r_thakker) pinged the site and it also confirmed the 502 error.

Google_ping_502

Recent History of Internet Outages

Outages do probably disrupt people’s work and life, but it seems we have to learn to live with some outages. Skype was down for many users for over a day in Dec 2010. While the popular blogger service Blogger.com, faced downtime in May 2011 for a few hours.

More recently, we have seen BlackBerry services being down for almost 3 days.

I read some tweets suggesting that even Gmail users had faced a small downtime last night, but I could not confirm it with Google Apps returning no disruption of service at all (see image below).

App_Status_Google

When Google returned the 502 error for a while today, it might not have had a big impact but outages that last for hours or days could really hurt both customers and the company that provides the service.

Do drop in your comments.

4 Comments

sandeep October 19, 2011

this was not a down time, its a problem with your browser..

Aditya Kane October 19, 2011

@Sandeep: I can assure you that it was a actual downtime faced by many people on Google search today. This was information I confirmed by multiple sources from different countries.

Swashata October 19, 2011

Yeah! I noticed this as well and found it quite irritating! Wasn able to send emails, search to get information and etc etc… I first realized this today afternoon when I was trying to send an email through thunderbird!

Praneel Shah October 19, 2011

I also got an error today in the noon while surfing and also have saved the screenshot.