Friday, May 03, 2013
Why no info?
I'm always puzzled by the lack of information and lack of meaningful error signals on the Web. Other important high-traffic systems provide all sorts of indications when they get bogged down. Airports, highways, transit systems, telephones. When those systems are detoured or jammed, you hear about it; sometimes through announcements or reader-boards, sometimes through radio and TV. Warnings can help to de-bog the system if people listen and avoid the jam.
Not so with the web. For about half a day now, everything tied to Google has been bogged down. Sites that don't use any Google resources are still running full speed, but Google itself, and everything that tries to read googleapis or googleanalytics or googlesyndication or gstatic or the thousand other arms of the evil octopus, grinds to a halt.
Is it a DDOS attack? An internal failure? Problem in a regional node? We don't know. We'll never know. We don't need to know. We are mere proles.
The bogdown did finally motivate me to switch my default news page to AOL, which doesn't depend heavily on Google stuff. Much as I'd like to, I can't switch away from Google for searching. Nothing else reaches foreign-language sources, nothing else reaches those wonderful old books.
¶ 7:26 AM 
