Google website crash hits British surfers

Google’s UK website crashed yesterday leaving thousands of surfers unable to access the service. The unexpected downtime also impacted on the thousands of websites which use the Google engine for their own search facilities.

Further problems were also reported on Google’s other services including Google News, which was unavailable between 8.30 and 12.00 yesterday, and Gmail, Google’s email service.

Bob Dowson, director at website monitoring and load testing specialist, NCC Group plc Site Confidence, comments: “This is not the first time that Google has suffered availability problems, and the latest issues will undoubtedly impact negatively on user confidence. As the most popular search engine on the web by some distance, even this minor outage has had a widespread impact. This unexpected downtime, while damaging, is unlikely to stop most people from visiting the website and using Google services - there is not another search engine of its quality.

“However, in order to ensure confidence in its widening cloud strategy, Google must ensure that its service is robust enough to avoid costly downtime. If the company is to provide further web-based applications to businesses, it must exude reliability.”