Google crashes for 90 minutes in Germany

Posted on 06 March 2008 By Mark O'Neill
Tags: Gmail, Google, backup, germany

This afternoon, just as my working day was finally starting to kick in (I’m a late starter), Google crashed. Thinking it might be a browser issue (I had installed a Google-related Firefox extension last night), I checked on Opera and Safari. Nothing. Zilch. Google was toast.

This had happened briefly once before, a couple of weeks back. Access to all Google domains from German locations was down but I didn’t wait long to see what was going to happen (I generally don’t have the patience). I just hit the reset switch on the router and the dynamic IP address changed and we were back into Google again instantly. So today we tried the same tack but Google was still down for close to a hour and a half. That meant no Gmail, no GTalk, no Google Reader and of course no search. I was forced to sink really low and use Yahoo. I thought I had died and gone to hell.

You might think I am quibbling over nothing but I work over the internet. My clients are on the internet. Being offline for more than 30 minutes could literally mean work piling up, lost work opportunities, missed appointments and so on. I’m certainly not mourning the fact I can’t get online to play Dark Age of Camelot.

When Google started to come back, things were very sluggish so we had to hit the reset switch to give it the online equivalent of a good kick up the ass. It seems we were not alone as others are also reporting outages. It seems that it was a problem with T-Com which is the main internet service provider here in Germany.

My girlfriend has lectured me on keeping all my eggs in one basket, on relying too much on Google. But I truly haven’t found anyone better to handle my email and a lot of people I deal with are on GTalk. But I guess I will be seriously looking at continual backup of my email and RSS posts from now on. Is there an easy way to synchronize the backup of RSS posts? I can feel a new article coming on!