
Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube had outage issues - pthomas551
https://thenextweb.com/2017/09/12/google-down-gmail-youtube-maps/
======
nxsynonym
I think it's a little premature to be calling this a "meltdown". It's like
calling one block of houses with power fluctuations a "blackout".

~~~
beastman82
Media outlets are in the business of making sensational claims.

~~~
Waterluvian
Googlegate 2017. Cataclysmic meltdown where I had to wait a whole 10 more
seconds for a video to load as it found another source.

~~~
ronjouch
I share the irony, but there's one nuance to bring: in our centralized web,
sometimes there just is no such thing as _" another source"_. Was trying,
during that outage, to watch Radiohead's "Lift" video posted earlier today.
Impossible, as it was posted today and only on YouTube, and all media coverage
are YouTube iframe embeds.

~~~
ethbro
Welcome to the recentralized web.

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kyrra
GSuite has status reports for things like this, and it tends to be a good way
to confirm a Google service outage[0]. Direct link to the issue[1].

[0]
[https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status](https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status)

[1]
[https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=1&iid=d4...](https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=1&iid=d4a7e9f502c0abebb65832c91edc4cea)

~~~
takeda
Kind of nice of them to show past results AWS for example tends to "forget"
past issues and even has problems admitting to the current ones until they are
very noticeable making their status page quite useless.

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dom0
Does not seem to affect Europe.

In fact, right now YouTube loads far quicker than it has for the last seven to
ten days, where it would take ages to load any YouTube page.

~~~
trhway
reboot helps. May be Google runs Windows. Then they just need to reboot more
frequently, ie. proactively.

~~~
21
Funnily enough, in one previous company I worked, which used Linux
exclusively, the software was very buggy, and the servers were rebooted daily.
We jokingly called that the "Windows solution".

When we proposed adding a daily reboot to cron, the tech lead (which
encouraged practices which lead to this low quality software) retorted that
"this in not Windows, it doesn't need constant reboots", totally missing the
point that just using Linux doesn't make you a developer of reliable software.

~~~
superhans2
Sounds familiar. I had a client once, who had to reboot one particular router
every day because it stopped working after 8h uptime. So one of their
employees did that every morning by logging into some server via remote
desktop to click the "reboot" button. I asked why they don't use some kind of
cron job to automate that task, they just said "it doesn't work that way, you
have to do it manually".

~~~
in9
Some people are anti-automation.

I am an economist, turned into "data scientist" since I've learned to program
in the past 5 years (hate that name...).

At a macro consultancy firm I worked, everybody lost it when I suggested that
we moved our manually downloaded data from a bunch of excel spreadsheets to a
proper database (28 years of macroeconomic data) so that we could
programatically extract data for online reports we sent/hosted. They said I
was being lazy...

~~~
tudorconstantin
I hope you took that as a compliment. Laziness is a virtue in programming,
according to Larry Wall: [http://threevirtues.com/](http://threevirtues.com/)

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jjlane
Our site was using hosted libraries, google fonts, and google analytics. All
of which seemed to be behind captchas, throwing CORS errors, and 503ing since
this morning. Swapped out JQuery cdn for now.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Is there a good reason to use these things hosted by a third party source?
Libraries are tiny, the fonts can be downloaded from Google Fonts and embedded
locally, etc. Even the Google Analytics JS script I presume can be stored and
run local.

Shouldn't a goal be to mitigate the number of possible failures which can
bring down your site by reducing the number of single points of failure?

~~~
bcherny
2 reasons:

1\. If you're still using HTTP 1.x, sharding assets across origins lets the
browser load them in parallel (if set up correctly). You can generally load
just 6 assets in parallel per origin, and sharding is a way to get around that
limit.

2\. A library like jQuery is so popular, and is so often served from googles
CDN, that chances are a user already has it in their local cache from when
they downloaded it on some other site.

That said, yes - the downside is more surface area that might go down.

~~~
dchest
_2\. A library like jQuery is so popular, and is so often served from googles
CDN, that chances are a user already has it in their local cache from when
they downloaded it on some other site._

Which of these versions do you have cached?

3.2.1, 3.2.0, 3.1.1, 3.1.0, 3.0.0, 2.2.4, 2.2.3, 2.2.2, 2.2.1, 2.2.0, 2.1.4,
2.1.3, 2.1.1, 2.1.0, 2.0.3, 2.0.2, 2.0.1, 2.0.0, 1.12.4, 1.12.3, 1.12.2,
1.12.1, 1.12.0, 1.11.3, 1.11.2, 1.11.1, 1.11.0, 1.10.2, 1.10.1, 1.10.0, 1.9.1,
1.9.0, 1.8.3, 1.8.2, 1.8.1, 1.8.0, 1.7.2, 1.7.1, 1.7.0, 1.6.4, 1.6.3, 1.6.2,
1.6.1, 1.6.0, 1.5.2, 1.5.1, 1.5.0, 1.4.4, 1.4.3, 1.4.2, 1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.2,
1.3.1, 1.3.0, 1.2.6, 1.2.3

~~~
castis
Asking an annoyed rhetorical question doesn't seem productive to the point
you're trying to make here.

As an actual answer, it would be variable proportional to the size of the
window between releases mentioned here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery#Release_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery#Release_history)

I'm sure a fair amount of people serve jQuery from a local storage. The
usefulness that the user might already have it cached is a non-zero point, no
matter how insignificant you may think it is.

------
dzdt
Works for me. Either quickly down-and-up or isolated to certain users.

I think google is pretty good about engineering no global single points of
failure; all updates are rolled out to only a fraction of users/machines at a
time, etc.

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Helloworldboy
Refresh google.com without caching. Logo is missing. There's something you
don't see everyday.

Edit: Everything working fine for me again.

------
octo_t
Clearly a malicious attack by Apple before the iPhone X announcement later
</s>

~~~
MBCook
Maybe too many people googling how to watch t or for the latest news?

Or maybe Samsung's announcement of a 'fold out' phone?

Or the Ted Cruz news?

It's a busy morning.

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seppin
I don't think i've ever read a news story about a website/app being down, and
it was still offline by the time the news story found me.

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pthomas551
Even the jQuery CDN is down intermittently for us here in Chicago. Sometimes
CSS for core apps like Calendar is not loading, either. Definitely something
amiss.

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kawsper
I was noticing higher latency than normal for static assets such as fonts
earlier today here in UK, but nothing was down, just responding slower than
normal.

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wastedhours
Had about 30 minutes of downtime (UK) - was completely down on one account,
and intermittent on another. So guess it wasn't affecting everyone.

------
puddintane
Looks like services are back up as of 7 minutes ago

9/12/2017 @ 10:27 AM +MST (Time services reported back up according to status
page)

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kiernanmcgowan
Lets just hope that 8.8.8.8 remains stable. That can cause a whole heck of a
lot more problems if it goes down.

~~~
speakeron
> Lets just hope that 8.8.8.8 remains stable.

That's why the smart money defaults to 8.8.4.4...

~~~
penagwin
I'm confused, 8.8.4.4 (and 8.8.6.6) are all owned by google, so I'm assuming a
8.8.8.8 outage could also have the others go out?

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user5994461
Works fine for me in the UK. Must be another of these Google issue that only
affect a few % of the users.

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jandrese
I'm guessing whatever happened has been fixed, because all of those services
are working for me.

------
bridge_ro
Gmail and YouTube are working fine in NC. Maybe they're getting things sorted
out now.

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idibidiart
Gmail is working fine on east coast.

I did hear youtube having 503 errors.

~~~
feocco
East coast, been on YouTube all day. Didn't notice anything. /shrug

~~~
champagnepapi
I am in the same boat. No problems with any Google products today.

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bmh_ca
App Engine / US Central + East working fine.

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agotterer
Gmail and gsuite working here in NYC

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elliotec
Working fine in SLC

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johnstew
no longer an issue

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mrguyorama
I was just about to make a snarky remark about the heatmap, referencing that
XKCD about heatmaps that just mirror population densities, and then I noticed
that the West Coast is barely affected. That's quite strange.

------
excalibur
Updated to say AWS and GitHub also affected.

North Korean cyber attack anyone?

~~~
asdfologist
Yes, Donald Trump is strategizing a retaliation with Jeff Bezos and other
allies at GitHub as we speak.

~~~
aneutron
Cannot upvote this enough.

