Massive Local Disaster: Down Goes Google (Briefly)

Local bloggers struggle to load web-based applications

Why even write this up? You know what happened, first-hand, and you probably cried over it. And yet future generations should be able to look through the newspapers of 2009 and read this opening sentence in a Washington Times article, about how pathetic we are: "Google, one of the Internet's most widely used sites, crashed Thursday in the Washington region at about noon."

That's right: a Web site had technical issues, and it would not load for a whole 30 minutes -- the average length of a television sitcom.

The outage lasted for about 30 minutes and also caused problems for numerous other Web sites — from those not directly connected to Google to YouTube, which Google purchased in October 2006.

So not only did this Web site crash for approximately 10 million years, but the other popular Web site, the one with the funny videos, took longer to buffer.

During these 30 minutes, everyone in Washington D.C. went nuts and speed-wrote blog posts about how they couldn't connect to the Web site, or even the Web site's online applications. Professional DCist blogger Sommer Mathis, for example, broke the news in an 11:54 a.m. post titled, "Yeah, Google Isn't Working Right Now."

It's not just you. It's all of us, too. Gmail, Google Reader, the entire Google family of products seems to be out across the region. Friends in other cities say they're not having the same problem, so who knows what's up.

Yeah guys, who knows what's even happening??

A grueling 21 minutes later, Mathis posted her UPDATE: "We have Gmail! We have Gmail! International crisis averted."

But as the Google team would explain on its "Google Blog," there actually was an international crisis behind this conspiracy to keep Sommer Mathis out of her e-mail for half-an-hour: "An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam."

Never Forget.

Jim Newell writes for Wonkette and IvyGate.

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