Google News stumbles again

World stops happening for 15 whole minutes

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in Applications, 20th May 2009 08:51 GMT

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Google's news aggregation and search site had another little lie down yesterday, for the second time this week.

On Monday afternoon the news page was briefly unavailable from the UK and it went down for another 15 minutes yesterday. Google UK did not comment on Monday's problems.

But Computerworld had more luck - Google said a small percentage of users got a 503 server error and apologised.

Last week Google suffered a far more serious outage, which meant users around the world lost access to most of Google's applications, including Gmail, maps, Google Docs and AdSense.

Some services were still available but were unbearably slow. Google said a traffic routing problem caused the blip.

The annoyance caused to the average user shows how far the search company has inveigled its way into our working lives. For companies dependent on Google Apps, the outage was more than just annoying, of course. ®

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