Millions of people were cut off from Google Inc’s search engine, e-mail and other online services on Thursday, sparking a flurry of frustrated venting that served as a reminder of society’s growing dependence on Google’s technology.
The Mountain View-based company blamed the trouble on a glitch that routed too much of its traffic through computers in Asia, overwhelming its system so badly that about 14 percent of its users encountered problems with the Internet’s most popular search engine.
The mistake also affected Google’s e-mail and several other services.
The outages began about 2:48pm GMT and lasted for about an hour, said Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior vice president of operations.
Google’s problems rippled around the Web because other sites rely on its analytics service and also draw much of their traffic from searches done through Google.
Many Web sites took twice as long to load and were twice as likely to fail during Google’s disruption, according to Gomez Inc, which helps Internet companies manage their applications.
“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,” Hoelzle wrote on Google’s blog. “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.”
Before the repair, many people locked out from Google went elsewhere on the Internet to express their dismay and despair.
Multiple messages posted on Twitter, a popular information-sharing forum, indicated that people all over the world had trouble with the Google search engine and e-mail. But other Twitter users said their Google services have been running smoothly.
Because Google is used by hundreds of millions of people, even a breakdown affecting a small percentage of its audience can have a huge impact. Google’s search engine, by far the most popular on the Internet, fields more than 9 billion monthly search requests in the US alone.
As part of its effort to retain its current users and expand its market share so it can sell more Internet ads, Google has invested billions of dollars to create a vast network of computers to lessen the chances of breakdowns.
Although its search engine is renowned for its reliability, Google is not fail-safe. Its five-year-old e-mail service, in particular, has been susceptible to periodic outages.
Taiwan aims to open 18 representative offices and seven Taiwan Tourism Information Centers worldwide by next year to attract international visitors, the Tourism Administration said on Saturday. The agency has so far opened three representative offices abroad this year and would open two more before the end of the year, it said. It has also already opened information centers in Jakarta, Mumbai and Paris, and is to open one in Vancouver next month and in Manila in December, it said. Next year, it would also open offices in Amsterdam, Dubai and Sydney, it added. While the Cabinet did not mention international tourists in its
EYES AT SEA: Many marine enthusiasts have expressed interest in volunteering for coastal patrols, which would help identify stowaways and illegal fishing, the CGA said Six thousand coastal patrol volunteers are to be recruited for 159 inspection offices to enhance the nation’s response to “gray zone” conflicts, Coast Guard Administration (CGA) sources said yesterday. Volunteer teams would be established to increase the resilience of coastal defense systems in the wake of two unlawful entries attempted by Chinese over the past three months, Ocean Affairs Council Minister Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) said. A former Chinese navy captain drove a motorboat into the Tamsui River (淡水河) in Taipei on the eve of the Dragon Boat Festival in June, while another Chinese man sailed in a rubber boat into the Houkeng
NEXT LEVEL: The defense ministry confirmed that a video released last month featured personnel piloting new FPV drone systems being developed by the Armaments Bureau Taipei and Washington are pushing for their drone companies to work together to establish a China-free supply chain, the Financial Times reported on Friday. A delegation of high-level executives and US government officials were yesterday to arrive in Taipei to discuss with their Taiwanese counterparts collaboration on drone technology procurement and development, the report said. The executives represent 26 US manufacturers of drone and counter-drone systems, while the officials are from the US Department of Commerce and the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit, along with Dev Shenoy, principal director for microelectronics in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense
‘ANONYMOUS 64’: A national security official said that it is an attempt by China to increase domestic anti-Taiwanese sentiment and inflame cross-strait tensions The Ministry of National Defense’s (MND) Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command (ICEFCOM) yesterday denied accusations by China that it had undermined regional security by carrying out cyberattacks against targets in China, adding instead that Beijing was responsible for raising tensions and undermining regional peace. The Chinese Ministry of State Security on WeChat accused a hacker group called “Anonymous 64” of targeting China, Hong Kong and Macau starting earlier this year through frequent cyberattacks. The group carried out cyberattacks to seize control of Web sites, outdoor electronic billboards and video-on-demand platforms in China, Hong Kong and Macau, it said, adding the hackers’