Yep, and half of the sites I'm trying to visit are affected as well, probably from Google Analytics or any of the other dozens of Google things everywhere.
It would be more likely to be Google fighting dirty, casually reminding everyone who owns the Internet, and how it would be a shame if some kind of an accident were to happen to it, such a pretty Internet that it is.
Google services has been steadily getting slower and slower for me. I can't recall the last time when google maps loaded the entire map successfully: 1-3 fragments are always missing.
I also stopped using gmail and switched to Mail.app. Gmail completely deteriorated for me: too often I'd press "Send" and it would just sit there forever with "Still working..." on top.
Actually, this reminds me that the time seems ripe for the next big steps in browser-based E-mail, the next product that can take GMail's features like lots of storage and mostly search as a starting point. My conjecture is that lots of people are tired of GMail sucking and would give other web clients a shot. And it might take a while before good service returns to GMail (if ever) given the rumors about the hairy state of the code base.
Anyone know of anything that I should take a look at?
Even site that have google ads are now effected. Just tried to do to Techcrunch.com and it is hung on the loading of doubleclick ads and pagesyndication.
I also noticed for the last few days the formatting of my google search results are broken. The first result's title is off to the right after the ebay logo.
They've also been denying service to requests that "look automated" more often lately. I assume that's an automatic response to a DDoS - must be a growing problem for them.
Scary? You must have a great life--on my list of scary things Google running slowly doesn't even register. They're having some latency issues and have no doubt dispatched people to work on it. Business as usual.
Scary is the fact of how dependent I am on this single company. They have my e-mails, they have my jabber account, they have some of my documents, they host the stats of my websites, people find my stuff using their search engine... Not to mention that my job becomes radically more difficult without the search (how am I supposed to find new libraries I need and documentation, hm?).
I usually don't realize all this stuff until something goes wrong (eg. they have latency problems). When everything just works having Google feels as natural as having fresh air or fresh water...
The thing is, would you do better if you host all your stuff yourself?
I know I wouldn't - so far Gmail has been down far less than my own mail server. Every now and then an update on my server breaks some stuff and I have to spend a few hours of my precious time fixing it. So far Google has saved me more time and hassle than when I host stuff myself, even with all the Google downtime.
It's funny I needed to get directions, and I'm just realizing now that I can use Yahoo maps (an hour later).
Update:
Nevermind, Yahoo maps just erases the addresses I entered when I press "go". I guess I'm stuck waiting for google maps to come back. I refuse to revert to mapquest.
I read something about that and stopped using OpenDNS yesterday. I felt my speed improve, especially when opening Gmail. But you know, could be in my mind.
[…] when Google compared search results pages with 10, 20, and 30 results per page, Mayer said the company found that putting 30 results on a page led to one-fifth fewer searches. Analyzing the data, she said that latency -- the subsecond delay caused by serving more results -- drove the decline.
"Users really care about speed," Mayer said. "They really respond to speed."
I'm pretty sure they would have factored that in to the study. Google is very good at counting which link you clicked, and how long it took you to find it.
Funny thing... I just realized that without Google I am kind of cut off from the world: no e-mail, no jabber... I do have some backup accounts, but the people with whom I'd like to communicate don't... Or at least I don't know their secondary addresses. It's scary. Well, at least I have HN to cheer me up :-)
