Google sites unavailable in some parts of the U.S..
(InfoWorld) – “Google Inc. users in the U.S. lost access to Google Web sites on Tuesday in a connectivity issue that lit up the blogosphere but whose causes remain unclear… An undetermined number of Google users that connect to the Internet via a specific service provider “experienced problems accessing Google and other services for a short period of time” on Tuesday, a Google spokesman said via e-mail.”
Thats would be COMCAST. We lost connectivity with Google yesterday here in New Hampshire. It felt like half the internet was unavailable. Google ads on pages would grind page loads to a halt. Google Mail lost meant I missed some of my mailing list reading. And I hadn't appreciated how dependent I had gotten on typing whatever I needed into the little box in the upper right of FoxFire: JavaScript syntax questions, contact information. Why bookmark? There's Google. Sure, there were other search engines to switch to, and our business has a business DSL line with another vendor, but it was remarkable how much Google was missed.
I attempted to figure out if we had DNS problems in-house but couldn't find any symptoms, other than lack of Google. Traceroutes and pings and digs seemed to yield correct information. I even tried to contact Comcast to see if they had a page with “known outages” but never located it. Worse, I tried a “Chat with Comcast” session that turned out to be a bot with a single-digit IQ that only knew the answers to 10 questions, none of which were “Why are you blocking Google?” Quite annoying.
Glad to see order has been returned to the universe.