This morning it appears that a number of Google services are having problems. We first noticed last night when our Google Analytics account wasn’t reporting any new data since 9am yesterday, but Analytics is often notoriously slow in receiving updates. This morning there were no further updates with our Analytics data, and in addition to that we have heard reports that both Google Finance and Gmail were and still are also having problems. Below is a screenshot of the Techcrunch stats from Google Analytics from yesterday, showing the sudden drop in hits being recorded.
It appears that the outages have affected a subset of Google’s servers and only those servers that are responsible for collecting analytics data and serving both Finance and Gmail for some users. Despite the huge capacity that Google has, and with plans for multiple new large datacenters across the country – they still at times experience outages on some of their services. Google is so big and so popular that even the slightest outage or problem is felt across the web. Since becoming open to all for registration for free, Google Analytics has become a very popular service, especially amongst bloggers. A quick scan of Technorati or Google Blogsearch results shows a large number of bloggers who have been reporting the outage in the past few hours.
Search Engine Roundtable was amongst the first to report the issue with Google finance (see the screenshot below, courtesy of their post)
GigaOm is also reporting the outages, and as yet there has been no official word from Google nor from any of the Google blogs or bloggers. Analytics has been affected for more than 24 hours now, the other problems seem random. If you have any news on any other outages to other Google services, or if you know what went wrong, leave a comment here. We will continue to try to find out what has happen and to get an official word from Google.
Update: It seems that other Google services are also down, namely Google News (story and screenshot at Google Blogoscoped) and users having problems with Blogger (from our comments below, see the error page here). The Google Analytics blog has a post that says the system is down for maintenance, and that users should be able to see a full update of all their date ‘by the end of the day’ (assuming they mean west cost USA time). As of 6:40pm there is still no data being collected in Analytics.
Andrew Girdwood, who works with a publisher that is in Google News, reports that referrals from Google News have come to a standstill, greatly affecting traffic to their site. This blog has a timeline of the issues at Blogger, with a screenshot.
It seems that a lot of different services are affected, Analytics is down for everybody but with Gmail, Blogger, Finance and News we aren’t sure how many users are affected or were affected. Our latest check shows all of these services being live (although slow at time – very ungoogly)
Update2: As of 7pm PST Google Analytics appears to be up with data restored for TechCrunch, but others are still experiencing blackouts.