Analysis: Google Mute On Yesterday's Outage

Google News being down may not have the impact of the recent Gmail outage, but it was noticed. It took approximately two minutes after we noticed that GNews was down to see fervent twittering about the outage.

What we really noticed, though, was Google's silence on the matter. We monitored Google's official blog and Google News' official blog during the outage and nothing about the downtime was posted. In fact, there is still nothing about the outage on those blog sites. The only communication from Google on the matter was reported by Reuters. Google doesn't acknowledge the downtime, saying only that many users "began experiencing difficulties accessing Google News."

No mention of any reason for the outage. Yet, we all know this comes pretty close on the heels of the Gmail failure. That was attributed to taking servers offline for maintenance and overloading routers. Why the silence now?

No one at this point could really win an argument stating that Google is unreliable. Yet, Google is morphing into a massive entity far beyond Web searching -- our personal data is residing on its network more, our business data is being encouraged to do so as well. Google is even venturing into creating a cloud-based operating system, a prospect that, if successful, could make us more dependent than ever on the cloud.

The criticism here is not that Google had, once again, an outage. It is a massive network, with an unprecedented amount of traffic. What's disturbing is Google being less than forthcoming about the reason for it. As Google asks us to place our trust in its offerings, we the users should be trusted with up-to-date and honest information about issues and downtimes.