Google suffers another embarrassing outage

For about an hour this morning, 14% of Google users experienced sluggish Google services throughout the US. It was later revealed that Google's own routers had pushed the traffic through its busy Asian servers, which couldn't handle the load.

"An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14 percent of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions," Google's SVP of operations, Urs Holzle explained in a statement. "We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and 'always on,' so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again. All planes are back on schedule now."

A lot of people are going to get huffy about this one, and of course they always have that right. But the naysayers have to understand one thing. Outages happen all of the time.  

I am on Google Apps for my business, and I know this isn't going to be the last outage. But I also I remember when I ran my own mail servers. Even when everything was done properly, we had outages. Our Exchange server required maintenance when log files would start building up or when we needed to move large accounts or when someone would send a 20MB attachment to the whole company –- and then retry to send it a few times when it didn't go through.

If it isn't your email servers, it's the server room power or maybe the air conditioners or a faulty switch or cut ethernet cable. Or maybe the ISP cut your Internet line. Or maybe the line between you and your email servers is down or routing incorrectly.

The point is, there will always be outages. The goal is to minimize them as much as possible. The pressure is on Google to keep them at a minimum and they have done a solid job.  They have thousands of engineers trying to reduce the outages as much a possible.

A glitch like this shouldn't keep people off of SaaS applications. The reality is that vendors like Google can keep the applications going much better than a small (or even large) IT department and they can do it for much less money than running your own servers.  In this economy, that proposition is rapidly turning from a "nice to have" to a competitive advantage that are keeping companies afloat.