Server Failure Knocks Some Google Users Off Line
Posted by Anne B. McDonald | Tuesday, September 26, 2006 5:39 PM PT
Our good buddies at IDG News Service report that the failure of a DNS (domain name system) server at Comcast caused problems for some Web surfers in the northeast section of the U.S. today, making several Web sites, including Google, inaccessible.
The server failure caused connectivity problems for a "few hours," said Jeanne Russo, a Comcast spokeswoman. By late Tuesday, the broadband provider had rerouted traffic to other servers, she said.
An undetermined number of Google users who subscribe to Comcast's broadband service "experienced problems accessing Google and other services for a short period of time," a Google spokesman told IDG News via e-mail.
"Google engineers helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information to the ISP. We believe the issue has since been resolved by the ISP," the spokesman wrote.
The server was knocked offline because of a hardware failure, Russo said. She couldn't exactly how many Web pages were unavailable to Comcast users. The problems were "very isolated, very random," she added.
"Google engineers helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information to the ISP. We believe the issue has since been resolved by the ISP," the Google spokesman wrote.
Postings in discussion groups and blogs seems to indicate the problem hit the northeastern part of the U.S. the hardest, specifically Boston.
This wasn't the case out here in San Francisco, where I Googled all day long without problems.
Could you go a day without Google?
I was in Boston between 11:30 and 2, using comcast, and couldn't reach google . Looked all over(used yahoo search) for a blog or discussion group to find out what was going on, but couldn't find anything. Could you post a couple of names where I might look the next time this happens? Thanks