News flash – Google suffered an outage. You wouldn’t have been able to read that information on Google News though, it was down too. In fact, from all indications every single major Google service was broken for a while yesterday. And that spelled trouble for any web hosting company that uses Google Analytics. That’s because since Google Analytics is hosted by Google, with code embedded in the web hosts’ website and potentially the order form. The effect is a slow down in site performance and ultimately – orders. If you want to see a graphical representation of just how huge our dependence on Google is – check out this graph on bandwidth usage from Wired Magazine.
One host that saw the effects of the Google outage firsthand was UK hosting company 34SP.com. According to co-founder Daniel Foster the Google outage was not directly affecting in-house activities, but saw the website suffer slow loading times, ”We could access Google fine from our offices in Manchester, but we began to see evidence that clients were having some slowdown in page loads on our website for a brief period. We really figured out there was a bigger issue with Google when we checked Twitter.”
And so the world – having been deprived of all things Google – quickly turned to Twitter.com. Comments ranged from the banal to the ridiculous, and everything in-between. At one point yesterday Tweets for the search phrase ‘Google down‘ were accruing at the rate of 226 per minute. Since the Twitter interface allows for only 15 tweets to be displayed at a time, there is just no way that anyone could possibly have been keeping up with the chatter on this subject as it happened. Additionally, it is difficult to access archived Twitter search results. So for those of you that missed it – here are a few of the choicest tweets reprinted from Twitter – randomly sampled during the outage yesterday. Enjoy!
”My life has come to a complete halt. Google is down.”
”When Skynet becomes self-aware it’ll take down Google along with the missile silos. We wouldn’t know what to do wo either of them.”
”Things to do while Google is down: flee, panic, tweet (until Twitter buckles), buy lots of canned corn for the pending apocalypse.”
”GOOGLE IS DOWN! EVERYBODY PANIC!!!”
” Google is down, my day is screwed.”
”google is down!! its broken!! i feel like i should be looting and rioting in the streets. no email for me this morning….”
”Damn you Google for slowing down the whole internet! Every site using Google Analytics has trouble loading”
”Since all of Google is down, I’ve used Yahoo search for the first time… it’s secretly not that bad”
”I was going to search for news articles about Google being down, but I only use Google News”
”Google’s down. Aren’t you glad Google didn’t buy Twitter?”
So what actually happened to cause the outage? You can read the official Google explanation here. It seems that Google errantly routed it’s traffic through Asia.
About Derek Vaughan
Derek Vaughan has been actively marketing on the Internet since 1995. His extensive online marketing experience includes the online direct marketing of books for $300 million per year NYSE traded book publisher Thomas Nelson. Mr. Vaughan also marketed products online at the Walt Disney Company as the online marketing manager of ecommerce for ESPN.com. He was also the marketing manager for the launch of the NASCAR Online Store in October of 1999.
More recently Mr. Vaughan turned his attention to online marketing for the Affinity Internet, Inc. family of companies - which owns a broad portfolio of web hosting brands. Additionally, Mr. Vaughan served as Vice President of Marketing for Aplus.Net and helped them establish a strong position in the web hosting field. Derek has also serverd as the VP of Marketing at HostMySite.com.
Derek Vaughan holds undergraduate degrees from both Indiana University and Purdue University, and has earned a Master of Business Administration degree from the Owen School at Vanderbilt University.
Through his theWHIR blog, Derek will touch upon online marketing in the Web hosting space, web hosting events and industry trends.
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