Of late I have been seeing a lot of Gmail outages, however since the day that I started using the internet, till today I have never seen Google.com being down, and then everything shattered today, Google.com along with many other Google services was down for many users for more than an hour.

Of course the public outrage aside, some of the Google engineers are going to have a pretty long time and list of reasons to explain to their bosses.

CNET reported that this problem was caused by Google’s network changes, which included a switch from IPv4 to IPv6, IPv6 is the newest internet protocol that will soon replace the IPv4 protocol, because hard to fathom but true, that we are soon running out of IP addresses on the IPv4 protocol, that discussion aside, it seems that the changes from the IPv4 to IPv6 networks caused a unknown bug to appear suddenly and cripple Google’s network.

Google did finally make a official announcement with regards to the problem, however they tried to keep it humorous, the actual cause is still lying deep beneath Googleplex.

Here are some excerpts about what Google had to say about it;

Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected.

This sums up the humorous part of the problem, now the serious part about what Google had to say about the outage;

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. 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. 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.

Coming to think of it, we have seen Google apologizing for lot of things now, and its happening frequently and causing lots of problems for their users and to their reputation too.

The once perfect company is starting to show signs of being less focused on what they do, having used Google products for quite sometime now, I can definitely say many people including the Google guys will certainly not be happy if something like this happens again.

What are your thoughts? Were you affected by the outage?