If you heard somebody “scream bloody murder” Thursday, said Ian Paul in PC World, they were probably trying to use Google News or some other service provided by Google. About 14 percent of the Internet search giant’s user base lost access for several hours, and apparently the Google outage was all due to “a simple traffic jam at an Asian data center.”
The impact of the “massive fail whale” was hard to miss, said Erick Schonfeld in TechCrunch via The Washington Post. “Gmail was down, search was slow, Google Reader, YouTube, and image search were all sporadic.” And in case you were lucky enough to escape unscathed, you could still read about the chaos in the “storm of chatter” on Twitter.
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