A Domain Name System (DNS) glitch left many surfers unable to reach Google for a short time on Saturday (7 May). The SNAFU also left Google services such as Gmail and AdSense unavailable for around 15 minutes between 2345 and 0000 (BST) on Saturday night. "It was not a hacking or a security issue," Google spokesman David Krane told AP.

Some surfers were rerouted to SoGoSearch.com during the short "outage" - sparking rumours that Google had become the victim of a hacking attack. In reality the redirection happened because, in the absence of Google.com, some systems started looking for www.google.com.net addresses taking them to SoGoSearch.com, which owns the domain. ®

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