May 7 2005: The day Google went down

OK. In the end, it was not as scary as it felt like. However, it would still be considered somewhat of an online historic event when Google went down big time for a small duration of time. Why is it such a big deal? Google is no longer just another search engine… It has become a part of the vocabulary. For an Internet user, there would be few days when he or she does not Google for something! This is what Google has become for anyone who is connected to the net…

We have come to live with it and we use it to test our net connections (by pinging www.google.com). If it is not accessible, we normally blame our ISP for having issues. However, for a couple of minutes (some reports claim 2 hours), Google indeed went down big time. Reports say that it was down for around 15 minutes between 6:45 to 7 p.m. eastern time.

Google has confirmed the rumors and clarified that it was not a downtime or hacked (as some other news sites reported). The problems as per the search engine company were DNS related. A Google spokesperson said in a statement: “It was not a hacking or a security issue. Google’s global properties were unavailable for a short period of time. We’ve remedied the problem and access to Google has been restored worldwide.”

A lot of discussion forums are suggesting that their recently launched tool Google Web Accelerator Beta might have something to do with it. We at TechWhack just hope such an online catastrophe does not occur again.