back to article Google hit by Monday morning blues: Talk, Hangouts, Sheets crash

Three Google services were gripped by disruption today – just four days after the company dramatically reduced prices for one of its online storage lockers. The web giant's online instant-messenger Talk, video conferencing system Google+ Hangouts, and office spreadsheet app Sheets were unavailable on Monday morning, US West …

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  1. Kalmairn
    Trollface

    With such vital services and heavily used down...

    ...you'd think there'd be a lot more activity in the comments here.

    (Sadly, I'm lost without my Google Talk, but only because it's my daytime link to my wife.)

    1. RosslynDad

      Re: With such vital services and heavily used down...

      I agree on its use as the spousal-conduit. Indeed I believe my wife is responsible for the outage: she tried to get a full history of our conversation (probably to get proof of my wrongness in some regard) and down it went. As we operate a "you touched it last" policy I think the blame is clear (however, she's got nothing to do with the other services - that must be someone else's missus)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: With such vital services and heavily used down...

      "daytime link to my wife"

      Dude, a whole new world of wonder and amazement opens up when you start avoiding the wife.

  2. frank ly

    However ....

    All my spreadsheets were fully available to me. They are stored on my domestic local network and automatically backed up twice a day with a 10 day rolling record (on a separate device). I also have a separate copy on an ftp server in a geographically remote location (which I try to remember to update regularly). What is this cloud thing they keep talking about?

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re: What is this cloud thing they keep talking about?

      It's that thing that is managed by people who don't know you nor care much about you or your needs, but will take your money and promise 24/7 service.

      Then they turn around and stop things you need because they scheduled a major upgrade during a work week, which, as any private-company-employed sysadmin knows, is something you do over the weekend so as to not disrupt business.

      But they got their business when you gave them your money. Your business ? No worry, Sir, we'll be back online soon. When ? <click>

  3. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    Monolithic?

    Where does that come from? I've never heard that before. Are Hangouts, Search, Docs, etc. in running on the same server?

    1. JackClark

      Re: Monolithic?

      Google is believed to run as many of its services it can off of a very small set of highly-integrated bits of software. For instance, it has a resource scheduler/cluster fiddler named Borg (new version: Mesos) that I've heard is in charge of the majority of Google jobs worldwide. I've even heard that Larry Page would like the company to ultimately use a single database across all of its services, but that has not happened yet (nor may ever be feasible). That said, we do know that it uses stuff like Spanner and F1 across a huge amount of services. So, when I say monolithic, I mean that the majority of Google's services are believed to draw upon a single mesh of services, so problems in one app may be indicative of a wider problem.

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: Monolithic?

        Thanks for the reply.

        From the stuff I've heard Google places a lot of emphasis on properly developing and testing its code, which means loosely coupling components. This doesn't in any way preclude the kind of rollout of the plumbing you refer to and associated incidents that integration testing didn't pick up.

        Delegating the plumbing (say cache management or replication) for the key applications to standard services is much smarter than reinventing the wheel in each application which I think any developer will have experienced at least once. But this doesn't make it monolithic.

    2. Euripides Pants
      Boffin

      Re: Monolithic?

      "Are Hangouts, Search, Docs, etc. in running on the same server?"

      Yes, they are running on an original IBM AT in the back corner...

      1. 404

        Re: and that IBM AT

        ...is running OS2/Warp. Rebels, those Google folks. Rebels.

        ;)

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The ultra reliable Linux strikes again :)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      If only they used Windows...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just as a side issue....

    Virgin Media has announced that it's replacing it's free allocation of web space in its back up app for LESS free space in its new cloud service.

    So I guess they are sensibly taking precautions to avoid risk of overuse..

  6. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Go

    The printers were humming today!

    BOFHs everywhere were busily putting copies of this article on another 'infallible' cloud failure on their bosses' desks....

  7. BriefAl

    So how's that cloud thing working out for you

    I hate the cloud. I travel a lot and have four homes on two different continents. One of my homes is in a remote location with no Internet service. While traveling - by car, rail, or plane - I am often in places without Internet. It is totally annoying to want to get to mail I have already read but since it is not on my computer it isn't available. The cloud is a bad idea. I have plenty of unused storage on my own system. Why would I want to make it unavailable to me whenever I am not able to connect to the Internet. I venture to say Google drastically lowered its storage price because people aren't migrating to the cloud for the same reasons I don't. Almost everyone I know is not interested in the cloud, doesn't want to give away their data and are terrified of losing it by storing it in some unknown, uncontrollable location. All you silicone valley freaks who live your lives on the Internet think everyone does. Get out in the world a bit.

  8. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    Also Google Groups (for Usenet) -

    Although Google Groups is showing "no issues", I assume that someone's noticed that we can't post into Usenet groups - which is what I use it for. I mean, I haven't reported it, but someone else would, right?

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