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Google shuts down for 15 mins..

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Source Title:
Google shuts down for 15 minutes
Source Url:
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/05/08/special_reports/science_technology/21_33_015_7_05.txt
Story Text:
Associated Press reports carried by many papers confirm that Googling stopped for 15 minutes on Saturday. The world's leading internet search engine shut down from 6:45 to 7 p.m. eastern time, according to Google spokesman David Krane. The article implies by juxtaposition, rather than states categorically, that its connected to Accelerator

"It was not a hacking or a security issue," said Krane. He said the problem was related to the DNS, or Domain Name System, though Krane did not elaborate. The DNS translates domain names for computers.
"Google's global properties were unavailable for a short period of time," Krane said. "We've remedied the problem and access to Google has been restored worldwide."
On Wednesday, the company, based in Mountain View, launched its Web Accelerator service. It's intended to speed access to Web pages by offering cached or compressed copies of sites from Google's servers.

- Y! MyWeb

Bit more on this

The Inquirer carries a "we was not hacked article" and a blow by blow account from around the world as it happens on WMW as bewilderment is expressed as people cannot believe what they see

Quote:
Malik, a well known and respected mainstream hack, has a total of six updates on his broadband blog, here, along with screen shots.

As an aside, said Malik, Google has reached its full capacity for the beta of its web accelerator. µ

The link in that quote to Malik's blog gives you a blow by blow of what happened with screenshots. He emails Google during the goings on.

Quote:
03.11 PM, PST: Looks like we are having a Google outage - apparently someone has hijacked their Domain, and something called SoGoSearch is showing up instead. GMail was down as well. Google ads are not being served up as well.

Quote:
David Krane, the big cheese @ Google PR wrote back a few seconds ago and had this to add, “Google’s global properties were unavailable for a short period of time earlier today. We’ve remedied the problem and access to Google has been restored worldwide.”

Quote:
Mr. Krane of Google: BTW, this was not the result of a hack or any kind of security issue. “Yes, it was a DNS issue. We’re seeing things as fully restored as of more than 30 min. ago. You’re the first to send such a screen shot and report this kind of issue. I’ll bounce it to the tech staff and will keep you posted.”

[added]
This little snippet from the WMW thread might point up what was going on

Quote:
During the outage, I did a fresh DNS lookup of google.com and the IP address came back just fine, but the site would not load using google.com, but would load via the IP address given on the DNS lookup.

By cornwall at May 8 2005 - 07:50

DNS issue

Whist Google was down, whois requests showed up other sites for Google.com requests but this, of course, does not necessarily mean the the dns was hijacked.

When a site is down, the whois, finds the first best match that had ‘google.com’ in the string, which happened to be the URL of a squatter/joker.

I would suspect this is why Google.com ended up showing SoGoSearch from a re-direct of one of these registered Google take-off domains

Call me naive, but Google's statement "It was not a hacking or a security issue,", if you believe it, should be taken at face value. They are not known for telling the whole truth, but they would not tell a lie.

One wonders if they will be forced to issue a "market calming" statement, for the benefit of Wall Street. Journalists may not understand dns, but they do understand SoGoSearch appearing where Google should have been, and if it can happen once.....

You will not be surprised to learn that there is, as yet, no statement on The Google Blog

By cornwall at May 8 2005 - 08:32

i did

get a domain couldn't be found earlier for a couple minutes for google.com...

By kpaul at May 8 2005 - 08:35

re: journalists

Quote:
Journalists may not understand dns, but they do understand SoGoSearch appearing where Google should have been, and if it can happen once.....

It's a journalist's job, imho, to learn about DNS and explain it to the public. How many will find out all the facts and try to understand the technical aspect, though.

By kpaul at May 8 2005 - 08:37

June 2004 Akamai outage hit Google

It's worth reading Akamai outage hobbles Google, Microsoft, others were offline for a period.

Quote:
"It could be anything -- somebody tripping on an power cord. I think an attack is unlikely, unless somebody was able to hit a central control node," he said.

Quote:
An investigation into the problem revealed that Akamai's DNS servers were not responding to requests. The problem appeared to affect the company's worldwide network of DNS servers, suggesting that the problem may have been with caused by a problem within Akamai rather than an external attack on its DNS servers, Ullrich said.

It wold be sort of unfortunate if the guy tripped over the power cable again last night:-)

By cornwall at May 8 2005 - 08:50

Coincidence?

implies by juxtaposition, rather than states categorically, that its connected to Accelerator

From G's Web Accelerator page:

Thank you for your interest in Google Web Accelerator. We have currently reached our
maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support.

By jimbeetle at May 8 2005 - 08:54

yeah co-incidence

I think it's stretching things more than a little to infer that Web Accelerator caused a general google outage.

By Gurtie at May 8 2005 - 10:20

Noticed the problem

I was wondering if my local dns servers were having problems or if Google was.

I could ping google.no, but not http://www.google.no/

But if I tried to access http://google.no/ with the browser, it had a redirect to the www version, which was out of the zone.

That's how it looked here in Norway. And the international version had the exact same problem.

By Spamhuntress at May 8 2005 - 10:24

Stretching

Sure is. I've just been up all night doing a rush job and forgot to put in a couple of ;) and such. Just thought it was a cute coincidence.

By jimbeetle at May 8 2005 - 11:13

It's a regional problem

Although google.fr, google.com, google.com and google.co.uk are down other google portals are still up. Google.it, .pl, .ch and others are still working.

By Richie at May 8 2005 - 11:25

 

Google.dk was down too - at first I thought it was just me being blocked because it happend right after I had tested a new spider from my desktop and forgot to use a proxy. I was actually quite surprised of how they got be "DNS-banned" - good to see it wasn't just me hehe :)

By Mikkel deMib Sv... at May 8 2005 - 12:12

hacks and screenshots

It is very likely that the people getting "sogosearch" were infected with a common type of spyware that takes control of your DNS and shows a landing page for any unresolved domain.

Some of the screenshots were so obviously faked - especially the MS one - http://img241.echo.cx/img241/6208/googlemsn3lp.png

Look at the browser window - on the top it says google, on the bottom it says "waiting for search.msn.com" - 100% hoax.

Not a single credulous screenshot - at least one not curable by Ad Aware.

By patrick at May 9 2005 - 01:52

The New Scientist has this

New Scientist has a "expert" quote in this article on the outage.

Quote:
Paul Mutton, an engineer with UK internet monitoring firm Netcraft, says the nature of the outage suggests the DNS server operated by Google itself suffered a malfunction. He suggest that local DNS servers were unable to resolve the name www.google.com because Google’s DNS server was malfunctioning and so instead resorted to trying close matches, such as www.google.com.net, which points to SoGoSearch.

"Their DNS servers simply seemed to break for a short while," Mutton told New Scientist. "They were not hacked and made to point at different servers."

The outage has nonetheless drawn attention to widespread reliance of many web users and services on Google and highlights existing concerns over the stability of DNS infrastructure.

By cornwall at May 9 2005 - 18:57