The hour-long outage affected Web surfers not only in the United States but in other countries and numerous other services including Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Analytics and video-sharing site YouTube.<\/p>\n
Micro-blogging service Twitter lit up throughout the morning with comments and complaints about the outage at the company which controls more than 60% of the US online search market alone.<\/p>\n
Some users were unable to use Google sites at all while others complained that they were performing sluggishly.<\/p>\n
The Mountain View, California-based Google said in a post on the official company blog that “an error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our Web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam.<\/p>\n
“As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions,” Google said.<\/p>\n
“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,” Google said.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Google said the outage began at 7:48 am Pacific time (1448 GMT) and lasted for about an hour.<\/p>\n
Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, described it as a “broad outage, a surprisingly broad outage.”<\/p>\n
He told AFP such a failure would just be an annoyance to the average Web user but could have a serious impact on Google’s attempts to promote some of its Web-based applications to businesses.<\/p>\n
“Their efforts to have some of their services, in particular their apps, and to a lesser extent Gmail, treated as serious business services that one can use instead of locally installed and maintained apps could be seriously undermined by a major outage like that,” he said.<\/p>\n
Sam Diaz, a senior editor at technology news site ZDNet, said the outage should not scare businesses away from Web-based cloud computing but “businesses should use this opportunity to put more thought into contingency plans.<\/p>\n
“Maybe companies that are thinking about adopting a cloud strategy, such as Google Apps, need to look into backup clouds,” Diaz wrote on his blog.<\/p>\n
Google also experienced a breakdown in February of Gmail, leaving millions of people worldwide without access to the free Web-based email service for a few hours.<\/p>\n