Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic You can all relax now. The near-unprecedented outage that seemingly affected all of Google's services for a brief time on Friday is over. The event began at approximately 4:37pm Pacific Time and lasted between one and five minutes, according to the Google Apps Dashboard. All of the Google Apps services reported being back …
"Since switching to duck duck go (as of last week) this one actually passed me by totally.
It's a bit weird not having predictive search results appearing anymore, but I'm sure I'll get used to that (Again)."
Don't forget Startpage/Ixquick, the only search engine with a European Privacy Seal.
I use DuckDuckGo and Startpage regularlly. Startpage for over 5 years and DuckDuckGo ever since I saw their only (?) billboard in SF about a year ago.
Before those I used Scroogle, a back door into Google using an old API that didn't include the more sophisticated tracking.
In one place I worked, our machines would have most of their problems on Thursdays. Different machines, different architectures, different models of storage devices... we couldn't figure it out. This was a raised floor, halon protected computer room with a combination lock on the door.
So, with nothing else to try, one Wednesday I prepared to spend the night in the computer room. Sure enough, about 2:00 AM the cleaning crew came in with a big buffer machine, preparing to run it over the raised tiles.
I chased them out and next day confronted the facilities manager about (a) giving the cleaning crew the combination to a secure room, and (b) letting them bang a floor buffing machine against our disk arrays.
He looked at me like a guy who'd seen his first kangaroo. He couldn't fathom why I wouldn't want the floors polished in the computer room. I finally gave up, got some tools, took the lock apart, and changed the combination.
As I write this, I now realize that I did not pass on the combination when I left the company. Oops.
Oh, Apple fanboi alert!
Compared to Apple? I presume? Absolutely.
Imagine an Apple search engine, where content is filtered beyond your control/knowledge and you can only experience the Internet as Apple thinks you should experience it. Total information freedom nightmare. No thanks!
You Apple sheeple can keep your "think different". Go buy another overpriced "ooh, shiny" iCrap tablet that Samsung will out perform in every possible way for a whole lot less.
Moron.
Not necessarily. I worked at a place with a Push big red button that was not protected, was right beside the exit, and more importantly, right beside some equipment that I occasionally had to lean over to work on. The second time I tripped the power off, my boss warned me that 1 more time and I would be fired. The third time it went off, I was at my desk, jumped up and screamed "NOT MY FAULT". The big red button was shortly thereafter covered by a flip up plastic case.
Methinks more likely a failure of our heroic churnalism soviet. According to the attributed source: "Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 BST on 16th August 2013." which fits perfectly with the lifted graph.
I suppose there's scope for some disparity as the fault propagated across Google's infrastructure but some reference to the obvious contradiction in the article is surely warranted.
In lieu of the Reg headstone icon which seems to have been removed for our protection -->
The artificial singularity that powers the Googleplex creates a non-negligible effect on spacetime around Mountain View. The graph shows the time that their servers perceive. Since the singularity slows down time, it took an extra 15 minutes after the event began in the outside world before Google's servers registered it. The stalwart team of boffins at Vulture Central merely corrected Google Coordinated Universal Time to regular Pacific Daylight Time.
The US Army and Air Force use ferrets for cable runs at Site R and Cheyenne Mountain. Some Airman at Cheyenne Mountain AFS came up with idea after watching his pet ferret drag a loose CAT5 cable through a cardboard tube while trying to think up a way to do cable runs easier than how they'd been doing them previously.
I believe FEMA uses them at Mount Weather too, I'm not 100% sure on that facility but it would make sense. Tearing out walls in bunkers under mountains isn't cheap or easy. And the Military as well as DHS tend to prefer cheap and easy, especially in places like Raven Rock and Mount Weather where by their nature have to be up and ready 99.9% of the time just in case.
So anyway NSA using hamsters may be closer to something "fo' reals" than you might think.
No hamster icon, but Paris is about as intelligent as a small rodent, and much less intelligent than the Musteladae (ferrets, weasels, etc).
Excellent point about DNS... you "think" it was affected... did you experience any DNS disruption directly? Or have you seen any data supporting this?
Just out of curiosity, why choose Google for DNS rather than OpenDNS, Cisco or whatever? Doesn't the Googleplex know enough of your business?
@AC 03:57
> Just out of curiosity, why choose Google for DNS rather than OpenDNS, Cisco or whatever?
Are you saying that Cisco offer a DNS service? If so, could you please post the IP address, as searching -unsurprisingly - brings up lots of links on how to configure a router to be a DNS server?
@AC 5:42
171.70.168.183
171.69.2.133
128.107.241.185
64.102.255.44
Perhaps ironically under the circumstances I had to Google it too. I've settled on OpenDNS myself, not least because they were the only service I saw competently and promptly address that phishing/poisoning débâcle a few years ago. The redirection for unresolvable queries is a bit naff though. Still, gifthorses...
Found a pretty comprehensive list here: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS
Anyone any idea what might have prompted the downvote?
OpenDNS is not really a good thing to use for a server that needs to know if a hostname is valid or not. OpenDNS will reply with a fake address that points to them for invalid hostnames. This is cool if you want some special notice web page that the hostname doesn't exist page etc... but for a mail server, not knowing the hostname is not valid is a waste of system resources... NXDOMAIN is the better response.
Google DNS is fast, though using resolver.qwest.net is faster at the moment.
> did you experience any DNS disruption directly?
I did. Across a wide range of website. El Reg being one.
And strange things as well. El Reg loaded, but only the bare bones HTML. Looked like 1996.
I was getting 301 Permanently moved messages on about half the websites I visited this morning or automatic "Moved to Here" on-the-fly links.
But it was completely inconsistent.
Whatever happened, and I think it was something external to Google, was very significant.
Everything seems back to normal, but something major sure as hell happened.
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