Interesting; midday on Saturday (UK time) and Google is down. A tracert command runs fine on both the .co.uk and .com addresses but the wewbsite doesn’t respond. Not only that but sites that I know run Google Analytics are slow to load, presumably because the analytics calls aren’t responding.

My first thought was to look for news on this but what do you do when your main source of news is the thing that’s not working? Nothing on the BBC News (probably don’t think that new-fangled internet thing is very important), nothing on the various blogs and RSS feeds I monitor. Let’s try Yahoo – nothing useful in their web search (stuff from an outage in 2005), and their link to news takes ages to load before again showing nothing current. How about MSN/Live – hmm, taking ages to load and then eventually appears with no CSS formatting or images. The search box is still there though – but nothing in the results. The alternatives aren’t doing too well are they.

Checked three SEO forums but nothing there; guess the Americans are all still asleep. Some UK blogs, nope nothing there either. Now in the old days we’d have had Fidonet…

If it wasn’t for the single hop tracert result I might wonder if it was an ISP problem. Hmm, just noticed the Sphinn feed isn’t responding either. I’m beginning to feel as if I’ve woken up in a parallel universe or a sci-fi story and people are going to reply, “Google? what’s that?” Like Beverley in ST-TNG when she’s trapped inside a collapsing warp field and people keep disappearing.

So, this all begs the question. What do you do when the company that has almost a monopoly on information disappears. Expect further thoughts on this. (Though you might not be able to find them if Google doesn’t come back up!)

(Edited to add that Google came back up around 3.45pm )