Two of the biggest names on the web had interesting weeks. Google experienced a big outage across a number of its services and Twitter mad a change to how it handles replies and sent a tidal wave of backlash throughout its user base.
Both companies received their fair share of negative responses from users, and both have responded to those responses on their respective blogs.
The Google Situation
On the Official Google Blog, the company explains what happened, and says it is good to go.
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.
That was yesterday though, and while the service appears to be running just fine for me, there are people having trouble accessing Google News again:
Google News is the only thing I’ve seen reported as being down for anybody so far this morning, so this may or may not be related to yesterday’s issue. Google News launched a video-rich redesign yesterday, and some are speculating that it may have something to do with that. I would imagine that we can expect another response from Google letting us know what’s going on.
The Twitter Situation
Usually the downtime issue is reserved for Twitter, but that service has received a different kind of turbulence. Twitter announced this week that it was changing the way users viewed replies. Users didn’t like that very much.
Twitter’s latest in a number of responses to the issue comes from Co-founder Biz Stone, who says:
We screwed up from a communications perspective this week. When I heard that this change was going out, I rushed to write a blog post. This setting had both product design flaws as well as technical flaws and I did not do my homework. My post came from a product design perspective but the technical perspective was the reason it went away so quickly. Normally, I spend more time understanding the issue before explaining it on this blog but in my haste I made a mistake.
Stone also explains that the issue only really affected 3% of Twitter users. Read the post for Stone’s full explanation on the issue.
