

Ask HN: What's going on at google? - oscardelben

It seems to me that some google services are not working properly lately.<p>For example I have some problems using safari with gmail (wont open at all) and with google groups (infinte redirects between their login system). The only way I can browse those google services is by using chrome.<p>But except for those browser specific issues, services like feedburner are driving us crazy. Feedburner counter is incorrect every other day, showing google reader subscribers one day and forgetting about it the other. Every blogger I talked with is annoyed by this problem. This specific problem has been bothering us for many weeks now, and I suspect there's nobody working on it.<p>Am I the only one who has noticed issues like these lately (except for feedburner which is not working for everyone)?
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qeorge
I had the Google Groups infinite redirect happening last week. Cleared my
session and cookies, and that seemed to fix it.

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bitsai
Same thing happened to me just yesterday (6/22/10). Clearing the session and
cookies solved it for me as well.

~~~
rays
Are you using safari 5? I have the same issue from time to time on AWS and
Google since Safari 5

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bitsai
I was using Google Chrome (on Ubuntu Lucid).

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SkyMarshal
Same and same, plus with Chromium daily snapshots.

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andrewtj
It does feel like there's been a lack of polish of late. Main things that bug
me are that AdWords keeps telling me to upgrade to Safari 4 from Safari 5 and
the redirect loop on Google Groups that inevitably results in a page telling
me I'm a bot sending automated queries.

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bad_user
The redirect loop in Google Groups happen to me too ... yesterday I could only
read the groups I'm subscribed to by being logged-out (as it happens only when
I'm logged-in).

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po
My google complaints:

* Any public google group gets flooded with spam

* I get NRA spam that gets through gmail's spam filter _every time_ even though I mark it as spam. I'm not the only one. Apple mail correctly flags it but google is oblivious. Whatever they're doing, I'm surprised other people aren't doing it too.

On a side note: my hypothesis is that if google ever dies, it will go out the
way Sun did.

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michael_dorfman
Purchased by Larry Ellison? That's a terrifying thought.

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po
Indeed. Larry's motto appears to be: _I_ don't think I'm all that evil.

~~~
samratjp
And that guy had/has a Maserati Problem too!

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fisadev
You can monitor the status of google's apps here:
<http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en>

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xaverius
Good find. I'm wondering if this is worldwide or just the US?

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ydant
Gmail has been amazingly slow and timing out for me a lot lately
(Chrome/Linux). The rest of the apps (and Gmail through Android) seem to be
fine.

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portman
I can't access GMail via IMAP today. Started at 5:15 AM EST.

Google Apps accounts are fine; this is only consumer GMail.

And yes, I've been having problems with GMail, FeedBurner, and Docs with
escalating frequency.

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izendejas
IMAP went down for me over a month ago. Gave up.

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woid
As of FeedBurner you should check FeedBurner status feed:
[http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-
feedfetc...](http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-feedfetcher-
subscriber-counts.html)

I can confirm I had really slow gmail yesterday. Works well today. I'm based
in Prague / Central Europe

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jan_g
Infinite redirects happen to me sometimes when I switch (log-out, log-in)
accounts -> my wife and I use the same computer at home. When that happens, I
have to clear cookies and browser cache and then it starts working ok.

~~~
Psyonic
I've noticed this happens if you log-in then log-out before the page is
finished loading (including G-chat, etc.) When you try to log-in again, it
often does the infinite redirect. Of course, there may be other causes as
well.

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jimfl
For 3 days, Google Buzz mobile loads, but the Ajax refresh just spins, and
never loads new content. Posting also fails. Mail works fine mostly. This is
on the iPad.

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Mc_Big_G
I also noticed something weird with Google lately. Even when I'm signed into
my google account, if I go to youtube, it asks me to sign in. When I click the
sign in link and use my google/youtube account, it redirects me to the "Do you
already have a YouTube Account?" page where I can log in ,which doesn't work,
or create a new account. WTF?

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johnyzee
For at least four months the AdSense landing page has had an apologetic
message explaining why you have to log in again even though you are already
logged into your Google account. Really wondering if Google engineers have
extremely short attention spans when it comes to 'old' projects,

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anigbrowl
It's definitely been ropey. My own hunch was that it was not browser related,
but to do with their rollout of Caffeine - either maintenance on other
products has been taking a back seat, or lower priority searches (from users'
pages rather than google.com) are not being handled as quickly, but sit parked
in the stack above other things - sort of like the situation a while back
where sometimes you'd visit a site and pages would stall due to an endless
wait from Google analytics).

There's more to this thought, but it's still basically a hunch and I don't
want to waste 15 minutes on it. I just hope they designate July Quality
Control Month.

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techiferous
Last week Google's jQuery hosting went down:
[http://www.seangw.com/wordpress/index.php/2010/06/google-
cod...](http://www.seangw.com/wordpress/index.php/2010/06/google-code-jquery-
outages-and-a-fix/)

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josephd
Why is the common denominator to these problems Safari? Any thoughts?

~~~
illumin8
Just an idea here - Safari 5 now pre-caches DNS requests for links on a page.
Is it possible that Google is doing some DNS-fu to load balance across
multiple data centers that causes strange issues like the infinite redirects
because there is a delay between when the DNS request was cached and the user
clicks on the link?

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ngvrnd
I've noticed problems lately with Gmail in Safari on the iPod Touch, and the
Reader app has always had problems on the Touch. For what it's worth, I'm in
the US Northeast.

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elblanco
I've noticed some problems with the interfaces of some of the apps, like voice
and gmail, not functioning properly unless I reload. It's particularly bad on
voice, I can't get it to make a call about 30% of the time because the buttons
are broken.

 _edit_ and I'm getting tired of having to relogin to half of the widgets on
my www.google.com/ig page three or four times a day because they aren't
tracking my sessions properly.

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suppressingfire
I've seen the same issue intermittently with gmail and calendar under Firefox
3.6, even though I'm properly logged in to iGoogle and reader...

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wherespaul
Chrome bookmark sync malfunctioned and I lost 400 bookmarks because it only
backed up a 100 of my 500 bookmarks. It just dumped 400 bookmarks but luckily
I had backed them up a few weeks back so I ended up only losing 100 bookmarks.

Also Chrome sometimes loops the sound from a flash video after I close a tab.

I emailed the Chrome team about these issues but no response.

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joshfraser
and why do so many of google's properties not work in chrome? like adsense?
and google analytics (well some days it works, others it doesn't)

and gmail is slow. and calendar is unavailable half the time.

if people are having problems with safari, it might be a webkit issue since
i'm seeing the same issues in chrome.

~~~
axod
Chrome seems to have had quite a few issues lately. Had a few reports of it
not working with Mibbit. The Chrome developer channel build seems better, so
hopefully that'll solve some things.

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ibagrak
Google App Engine has also been performing poorly
([http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/datastore-
perfor...](http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/datastore-performance-
growing-pains.html)). I wonder if these performance issues may be related.

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thirsteh
For the login-related problems with Safari, it should help to empty its cache.

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quizbiz
You're not the only one.

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rrc
Google Docs export functionality was also broken all yesterday, resulting in
an infinite redirect loop upon download.

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jrp
Monday and Tuesday the iPod Touch's mail app wouldn't sync with Gmail. It
started working again last night.

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gokhan
Bah. Come here to Turkey and see what can possibly go wrong with Google :)

(Just ignore me. )

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defen
I've also gotten the infinite redirect on occasion, when trying to log into
GMail (firefox)

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random42
Why not send email to google customer support, and ask them, if you are
genuinely interested in knowing?

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WalterGR
Google doesn't have customer support.

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random42
I mean to say that if one is genuinely interested in solving a problem,
ranting/cribbing in front of people who cannot do much, instead of bringing
the issue up with the source of the problem, is rarely an effective solution.

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WalterGR
The guy was just expressing his opinion. What the fuck is with all the
downvotes, HN?

Did the karma requirement for earning downvote privileges get reduced?

I might as well limit myself to Reddit. Same attitude, more content.

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geuis
Using Chrome and google reader, after listening to an mp3 in a feed, many
times the UI locks up and the page has to be reloaded to make it usable again.

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pasbesoin
A while back, the online applications stopped working for me in anything but
Chrome (well, I refused to try IE). I haven't tried again, lately (so, another
Google win?).

