Mvied Development

As you may or may not have noticed, the Internet ran into a few complications today. Apparently the problem has been linked to an AT&T routing problem somewhere in the Midwest. Some people didn’t experience any problems, while others were unable to access many large websites, most notably, Google. Several other large website such as Wal-Mart, Apple, and Microsoft were unreachable by people in certain locations.

I first noticed the problem while at work, trying to Google something. Google was down, so I used begrudgingly Yahoo!. Afterward, I noticed the website that I went to was also being extremely slow. I figured it was just our terrible T1 connection, but then used my Firebug to inspect the website and see what the problem was. It turned out that the problem was loading the analytics script from Google. Right about that time, I began to get worried. I tried a few trace routes and pings to Google and they all returned a bit dodgy. I then tried to ping other websites such as apple.com and microsoft.com and they too were unreachable. It was about this time that I began to wonder what would happen if Google ceased to exist.

I decided to check out Twitter to see exactly what was going on as there was no way to find any relevant information on what was happening. What I found was an abundance of news related to ‘googlefail’. You can see a stream of Twitters related to googlefail at the bottom of the post.

Now of course the problem wasn’t on Google’s end, but as Google is probably the most visited site on the Internet, when it goes down, people know it. Unfortunately, websites that use Adsense, Google API, Analytics, or any other Google service, became almost unreachable by people who could not reach Google.

11:30 AM (CST) Google appears to have fixed the problem on their end. They obviously disabled the route that linked the problem with AT&T. Shortly after that, the previously unreachable website began to come back up. This may be because AT&T fixed the problem on their end, or the other websites are taking the same approach as Google and disabling that route. On a side note, the problem seems to be linked to more than just problems at AT&T as keynote is showing packet loss in multiple places.