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.

Misrouted Traffic Blamed For Google Outage is a post from: The Inquisitr

Something very strange is going on with Google this morning. Most Google-related services appear to be either down or barely functioning as of Thursday morning.

Even the google.com home page is barely loading, if at all, for many users. Gmail, Google Reader, Google News, and most every other common Google application seems to be suffering similarly.

A quick poll on Twitter confirmed I’m far from the only one experiencing this seemingly widespread outage. I’ve placed calls, e-mails, and tweets to try to get some answers as to what’s happening. If and when I hear anything, I’ll pass it along here.

The SANS Internet Storm Center now reports the Google-wide outage has been going on for about an hour, since about 10:45 EDT.

Update: Massive discussion going on via Twitter: #googlefail and gmailfail.

Update: Google services seem to be (more or less) back online as of about 12:20 p.m. ET. No official word on a cause yet. There’s some speculation via Twitter that the issue may be specific to AT&T Internet customers, though that information has not been confirmed.

Update: Google is “looking into” the issues and promising a full update sometime soon (via the first official statement). Everything appears to be back to normal at this point.

Google Outage Appears to be Over; No Explanation Thus Far is a post from: The Inquisitr