Ask HN: Google Search down?
Server Error We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue.
Please try again later.
Server Error We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue.
Please try again later.
Three people in critical condition after Google data center 'electrical incident' in the Council Bluffs, Iowa datacenter (us-central region, I believe)
This can't be true, can it? What's the reason to lie, when the lie would be so incredibly obvious?
If I recall correctly, the mitigating PPE for expecting an arc flash is reflective, because so much of the energy imparted on a victim is straight-up electromagnetic radiation. You get lightbulbed to death.
This reminds me of the distant past. The death of Michael Jackson resulted in (almost literally) the entire internet suffering an outage.
I don't know that in an event like that today we would do significantly better. Literally the entire country stopped for this to try and find info, because the event was just so extreme; the stoppage of all international flights and grounding them in Canada and Mexico with no notice was a side note, when that's literally never happened before. And, as with most major disasters of this type, the main issue was not physical damage but lack of electrical power to operate data centers and other infrastructure.
A good chunk of transatlantic traffic runs through New York. That IMO is probably a major thing that I don't know we can handle.
How am I supposed to work? Also, I don't remember when Google Search was last down. Either google has great uptime, or I have terrible memory.
Looking up "Putin election" delivers me several prominent articles saying Russia's most recent election was fraudulent.
I'm guessing it is different if you are actually based in mainland Russia and using Yandex, but it does not seem so tilted as you are suggesting for Western, english users.
Searching for "Deutschland" results in "deutschland.de" which is ok but then, once again, followed by "News-Front" and "anti-spiegel", some crappy Wordpress conspiracy blog. I also took the liberty to search for "Proteste in Deutschland" (protests in Germany), and low and behold: First 3 results: Wikipedia, "Russia Today" and "Report24". The last one yet another propaganda website run by "Querdenker" (our version of Qanon-style Antivaxx nutjobs).
Searching for "Ukraine Krieg" (Ukraine war) once again leads to RT and News-Front.
"Energiewende" is also a quite popular word in Germany. What does yandex say to this? Again, first 2 results are ok. Third result? That shitty Querdenker page "Report24" again. 5th result is Russia Today. And somewhere at the end i even spot "Reitschuster", a known right-extremist blog.
There is no way in hell, that these websites are so well optimized, that they outperform every single outlet in existence, for pretty much every keyword i can think of just now. Especially not some shitty Wordpress page (Report24) that was clicked together in mere days and online for just a single year.
Searching for these keywords in the localized version of Google and even Bing gives wildly different results. There is no sign that any outlets are preferred. Sometimes i see right-leaning sources on the top of the first page, sometimes it's left-leaning, other times it's some trash tabloid like the "BILD".
So either their search algorithm is complete and utter trash, or they are actively boosting pro-russian websites and mix them up with a few established news outlets, to make them seem more trustworthy. Since their "news" section is also only allowed to show state-approved media, my guess wouldn't be very far off.
Multi-word searches seem less prone to this. What happens if you search "Putin election" in German? Do you get articles critiquing the election or still praiseworthy articles?
I do get several captcha requests from the website now. Might be coincidence, because i'm on a different computer now. It does get annoying, though. Like, really annoying. Clicking 1 or 2 pages leads to yet another captcha.
In fact, anecdotally, Bing is markedly better at narrow search results (quoted phrases, excluding or including specific words, etc).
Google on the other hand is significantly better at what I’d call fuzzy searches, where you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for but have some vague idea (some esoteric spelling, or that type of apple that has unique properties but you can’t remember the name of, etc.)
It seems overfitted to delivering results with mass appeal. Perhaps I’ll try bing the next time I get that tingling feeling google will throw out the search terms intended to narrow down what I want to find.
So they just look at popular (or profitable) queries.
Whatever happened to the man pages, y'know.
I switched to this from DuckDuckGo several months ago because Brave uses their own index, while DDG famously uses Bing's. The results are a lot better in my experience and it feels like the search engine is built for me instead of for advertisers. Brave search just feels like cleaner, quieter tech. I've also never seen NSFW results on an innocuous search (a problem I had regularly with DDG). On the rare occasion I end up using Google, seeing the results page is a jarring (and slightly stressful) experience with all of the distractions and irrelevant results.
Yes, intermittently.
(sorry for msn link, archiving on phone is rough)
Maybe because you said something crudely insensitive in a community that might know the victims, and definitely includes people who do similar jobs?
I hope none of your friends or family ever get char broiled.
Oh well, I guess shitting all over women and minorities in tech is a more comfortable target for this demographic.
It’s not DNS
There is a no way it’s DNS
It was DNS
A) Googler B) it wasn't DNS or BGP
Flashy answer on front page "No"
In exchange for this problem, HSTS demands that browsers stop acting as user agents and refuse to operate, no matter what the user says. It allows the server to dictate what the browser is supposed to do, without any bypass.
Finally, the number one person who ends up wasting a lot of time trying to bypass HSTS: The dude trying to fix the certificate. A hilarious number of poorly-considered services have admins administrate the certificate from the web interface... which it won't allow the admin to access because of HSTS. This ends up exacerbating a simple problem into a complex one, and adds significantly to downtime.
HSTS should be considered hostile and not recommended until amended with the removal of the "no user agency" clause. Honestly, a real world practical improvement for the entire HTTPS stack would be a more gentle expiration curve (browsers loading sites with expired certs for a week or so with a yellow address bar or something seems like a good idea, it's not like sites publish their private keys the day a cert expires).
Unfortunately, the authors of HSTS did not consider the real world when developing their spec, they considered a virtually non-existent security case they wanted to address, and built a solution to an imaginary problem with significant real world negative impact.
Then people using SSL will renew earlier to avoid embarrassment.
I have yet to see any example of a real security risk involving a barely expired certificate. It seems that we invented a way to make the web extremely fragile for... really no good reason.
DEFCON has been hosting a Wall of Sheep since forever. They capture and analyze traffic then publish the leaked credentials and other fun stuff. Apparently it's still going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZabsNgMHCM . Here's your example.
What are some technical reasons you might not be able to do this? I've only ever seen stupid bureaucratic reasons firsthand.
Have you seen the new malicious websites with fake CAPTCHAs that say "click allow to this dialog box to prove you're human"? If you give nontechnical users an easy way to bypass a security check, the bad guys will just tell them to do so, and they'll listen. And remember that if a technical user really does need to bypass HSTS, they can, even if it means editing a SQLite database by hand.
oh.
It's possible to use a non-datamining search engine while being completely bearish on crypto too. Google needs more downtime.
> It's possible to use a non-datamining search engine while being completely bearish on crypto too.
Indeed it is. Brave leads this example. Mozilla on the other hand is in Google’s payroll, paid to shill their privacy violating search engine.
There is a no way it’s DNS
It was DNS
Nice page title: "Error 500 (Server Error)!!1"
2 minutes is quite the expensive fuckup.
If Google is walking down the street and stops to pick up a million dollar bill, it actually loses money.
https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q4_alphabet_earnings...
maybe also triggered by this? /s
https://www.google.com/search?q=is+google.com+down
And I got answer No.
I have no idea what it would quote to give this snippet answer...
Server Error
We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue.
And then sometimes getting a more generic 500 message.Further; was the DC not protected by redundant power?
Also even more interested to see how this arc flash even happened. Presumably these were experienced engineers working with obviously dangerous power levels.
That's the reason. In principle, Google distributes execution and data storage for its mission critical applications. And most of the time, they do a pretty good job of that.
But (especially with the hardware crunch in recent years brought about by various effects, including COVID and Bitcoin mining putting pressure on the market) their ability to build out new datacenter capacity has stalled, and as a result, things sometimes end up bunched up in suboptimal ways, and a high capacity data center can become a single point of failure even though it shouldn't be.
> Was the DC not protected by redundant power?
Depending on where the flash occured, it may have been at the point the redundancies feed into the building.
If this topic is of great interest to you, US Patent 10,678,647 could be fun.
Server Error
We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue.
Please try again later.It's been a looooong time :-o
edit: aaaand it's back
Routing server config? Interesting that its intermittent, I wonder if that tells us something about the internal routing of requests.
you.com
(founder here :)
Now front page won't load.
... but now it's back
The whole internet would need a much larger RAID, with literally dozens of hard disks.
But the 25TB you showed above is a better prospect.
(Also yes, you are correct within the realm of reality, but not within the realm of comedy.)
You may need it for the IOPS of actually using it, but that's another thing entirely.
What if in fact Amazon uses EMC gear underneath