Server Error Causes Google News Outage

It’s not something you see every day. Internet search giant Google (News - Alert) experienced a brief outage to its Google News server today, leaving an unknown number of Web surfers missing their morning headlines and without e-mail.

 

If you did a Google News search between 8:40 a.m. ET and 9:55 a.m. ET today, a 502 server message appeared reading, “Server Error: The service you requested is not available yet. Please try again in 30 seconds.” E-mail service was also impacted.

 

For many users, including me, 30 seconds came and went. And over the course of an hour, users still were without service. Google search, however, appeared to function normally.

 

People on Twitter were Tweeting about the outage, offering users constant updates and humor about the server issue. Some users reported that Google Apps was also down.

 

“Is Google News down?” one poster identified as ericaknight wrote on Twitter. “How will I be informed today?” Another poster, mpappas, wrote, “ahhh Google News is down this morning...how will I survive this day?”

 

You can see the error message here:

 
Google News is the news technology site powered by Google. The site receives headlines and stories from about 4,500 sources from across the globe.

 

At the time of writing, the Google news blog had no comments about the outage. But Google reportedly said technical problems had prevented a "small subset of users" from getting into their e-mail accounts. The e-mail issues also had a ripple effect on other services, including the Google's search engine, the report said.

 

The trouble lasted for hours nationwide before the issues were resolved by early afternoon, the AP reported.

 

It’s not the first time Google experienced issues with its service. Last fall, Google had problems with its Gmail service. The company announced that it detected a problem that prevented Gmail users from accessing their accounts.

 

On a related note, Google made headlines this week when it announced it will be enhancing the search functionality on its site with new features. The new services, which are to launch over the next few weeks, are mean to help Web surfers who can’t find what they need in their initial searches and assist others with more complex research.