Perhaps you may have noticed the seas boiling red with blood, the whore of Babylon rising, and the Antichrist roaming the Earth, strewing carnage in his wake. That's because Google (GOOG) crashed this morning. Yes, you read that right: Google went down.
To be precise, Google News crashed between 8:40 and 9:55 ET, and millions of people searching for today's top stories had to go elsewhere—even actual news Web sites! Data Center Knowledge writer Rich Miller claims that the outage happened as Google tried to upload YouTube video links to news items.
And it didn't end with Google News, either. Reports have been twittering around the country that Google Calendar and Gmail have been affected, and even Google's main page was reportedly disrupted in some areas. Google has acknowledged problems with Calendar and Gmail on its Apps Dashboard page here. But so far, the company has offered no official explanation as to what happened. We've asked Google's reps to explain and will let you know what's going on as soon as we find out.
So far, it's unclear how widespread Google's meltdown was. Some reports indicate that the problem was centered in the Northeastern United States, but ComperWorld writer Steven Vaughn-Nichols reports that people as far away as Europe and Australia are experiencing extremely slow performance from Google sites. He also thinks this may be a massive hack job, a denial of service attack on Google.
Again, we'll update you as we know more.
*www.reuters.com/article/wtUSInvestingNews/idUS315666456520090514
