Rolling Outage for Google

Many users are experiencing trouble reaching Google today in a rolling outage that is affecting some regions more than others. The troubles were first seen at Google News, which came back online after an outage this morning, apparently to add video links to news searches.

Meanwhile, there are widespread reports on Twitter of trouble reaching other Google services, and even including the home page. The Google Apps status page is acknowledging a “service disruption” for Gmail and says a problem with Google Calendar has been resolved.

UPDATE: Urs Holzle, who oversees the company’s data center operations, has posted an explanation on the official Google blog. ”An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam,” Holzle wrote. “As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and ‘always on,’ so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again.”