Google is DOWN!

[BioALIEN]

Tonight (Sunday 8th of May 12am) Google was down after a friend informed to check the website. This includes Google.com, Google.co.uk and potentially many of their worldwide extensions too.

Some of the Google extensions that are still working are:
http://www.google.com.cn
http://www.google.de
http://www.google.it
http://www.google.com.sg

This leads me to believe they are experiencing problems on mainly their .co.uk and .com domains. The reason for the downtime is still unknown, speculations leads me to believe either it is an attack, or Google is undergoing maintenance.

Google has been under increasing pressure lately from Yahoo and MSN both launching big improvement in their web search service.

More updates will be posted as we find out...

[BioALIEN]

Google.com and Google.co.uk is back online. The cause of their downtime is still unclear, I've had a look at the GoogleBlog and nothing is stated!

[BioALIEN]

Google and security experts said Monday a brief weekend outage of the Internet search giant's website was not due to a hacker attack, despite fears it was linked to a new type of Web hijacking. "It was not a hacking or a security issue," a statement from Google said.

"Google's global properties were unavailable for a short period of time. We have remedied the problem and access to Google has been restored worldwide."

For a brief time, however, security experts were abuzz over the possibility the outage was linked to a so-called "poisoning" of the Internet domain name system (DNS) -- a growing security threat.

For several weeks, experts have been concerned about the threat in which a hacker can direct users from an authentic website to an alternative or fake site. And the concerns grew when some Google users reported they were redirected to another site called "SoGoSearch."

"Google went bye-bye for 15 minutes. Or perhaps it was an hour. It depends on who you ask," said Tom Liston of the SANS Internet Storm Center, a site maintained by academic and private sector security specialists.

"But what of the mysterious 'redirects' to other search pages?"

Liston said some computer systems are programmed to search for an alternate site if it gets no response from the initial effort, and ended up with the site google.com.net, owned by SoGoSearch.

"If an overzealous browser tried to 'fix' an unavailable Google.com, it's quite likely that you could end up looking at the SoGo search engine," he said.

Google did not elaborate on the cause of the malfunction. But Liston said the most likely explanation was that "somebody in charge of Google's DNS did something dumb ... (it) doesn't mean that the entire DNS system has been compromised."


© 2005 Agence France-Presse.
© 2005 NewsFactor Network.


I've found further leads to the above discovery of Google's outage that confirms I was not imagining things :)