Google apologizes for slow service

Following the reports of slowed and even interrupted service, which Google deemed a “traffic jam”, the company has now apologized for its slow service on the main page, the news site, and Gmail.

"An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our traffic through Asia," said Urs Hoelzle, a spokesman for the company and Google’s senior vice president of operations. "As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions," he said. "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. Hoelzle continued, "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.”

The outage of the Google services has caused many to question the reliability, as this isn’t the first time a situation such as this has arisen. In January 2009 the company had serious technical issues resulting in an inability to return search results to users. In February 2009, the Gmail service experienced an outage that left millions across the globe with zero access to their web based email for a few hours.

Major outages such as this undermine Google’s attempts to deliver a “cloud computing” service which can be used rather than locally installed applications.