"Google’s Outage Was Asia’s Fault"

That was the sensational title on TechCrunch. Google re-routed some traffic here and there to pass through Asia. As someone commented in that post, why was it "Asia's fault" when Google was the one who futzed up and sent traffic to unknown destinations? We can accept some responsibility for SARS, but this?

The Google Blog has this explanation:

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This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern...
5/14/2009 12:15:00 PM

Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That's basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time. An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and "always on," so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again. All planes are back on schedule now. Posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations
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I experienced intermittent problems with access yesterday: Gmail and such. Here's my theory:

Google was re-tooling some of it services that it has been customizing for particular partners and clients .... like say... inSing.com !!! So while they were playing around with the DNS servers, some one probably was off by a digit or so and "kablooey!" traffic went everywhere.

What made me think of this? Well, I went to the launch party on Wednesday and thought it was a pretty cool offering. So yesterday, I went online to check it out. Good Stuff! I signed up for an email account and realized that it was a "grey labeled" Gmail account with inSing branding.

So to offer this kind of service with partners, Google would have to play around with the DNS and such. Make sense? Anyhow, I wonder if this has anything to do with the error I got below, or it is just Beta teething problems.