Downtime for Google?

I had no connectivity to http://google.com/ today — strange experience…

Google Adsense logo First I noticed that this site would load very slowly — the big blue header would load at normal speed, but then things would stop for a while, after which the rest of the page would load. The pauses were caused by the Google Adsense advertisements I use — with no connections to the Adsense server, the browser would “hang” for a while until a timeout was reached.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it were only my site that’s broken because of this, but since Adsense is to popular many, many sites around the Internet would suddenly load at crawling speed. (A moment later…) The pages now load at quite normal speed, but without the Adsense advertisements.

While testing I tried to access google.com through a SSH tunnel into [DAIMI][]. That worked fine, so I guess the problem might lie at my end? Trying directly I have no connection to either http://google.com/ or http://google.dk/. But http://google.ch/ works! Quite strange I think… Have any of you experienced this?

3 Comments

  1. Michel Fortin:

    No, not seen here. The problem could be at your end, or it could be at the Google datacenter your browser was directed to, which is not necessarily the same in every part of the world.

  2. Martin Geisler:

    My ISP, Swisscom, apparently has somebody called IP-Plus as their supplier, and they acknowledge the problems with reaching Google:

    21.11.2005 17:49: Please be informed that google has resolved
    the denial of service attack and their services are running normally
    again. We are observing the situation.

    So it was apparently a Swiss-only DOS (denial of service) attack.

  3. Fabio Parri:

    It was an international problem, I think. Google couldn’t be reached from Italy, too.

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