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Ask HN: Google Search down?

108 points by alhirzel ↗ HN
I am getting the following message when performing searches:

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.

285 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] thread
gunsch
Yep. google.com homepage is giving me 502s.

It's been a looooong time :-o

edit: aaaand it's back

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jameshe
Noticed it was down for about 2 minutes, but up again. As with any big outage, I wonder how much money was lost in those 2 minutes...
russellbeattie
OK, so in round numbers, Google makes roughly $65 billion in profit per quarter. Dividing by 90, is around $722 million per day, which is roughly $200,000 per second.

2 minutes is quite the expensive fuckup.

game-of-throws
I'd use revenue instead of profit, since their expenses don't disappear just because the site is down.

If Google is walking down the street and stops to pick up a million dollar bill, it actually loses money.

Aperocky
But do they actually cough up 2 minutes worth of profit because they were down for 2 minutes?
quickthrower2
Expensive for you, but for Google it is nothing. A bug in their Ad placement stack would cost more.
jeffbee
Google ads outages often have positive revenue impact because with the quality systems down or impaired they may briefly serve tons of junk that pays a lot but users hate.
quickthrower2
Slowly mix in 12oz of OKR obsession, some salt, and you have a recipe for low quality ads, fairly often.
techdragon
If we didn’t need more evidence of search quality sliding downhill. When was the last time this happened for enough people (failed ab tests don’t count) that it cropped up on HN and got several confirmations that it was happening to other people. Not a good look for Google.
jwitthuhn
I am seeing failures on and off. If I keep resubmitting it will go through eventually.
donkeybeer
Happening on some queries right now, mainly some image searches it seems, good to know I am not the only one.
sydney6
Search suggestions appear to be also down for me..
jhickok
Search is currently not working most of the time for me.
comboy
It's been like that for years.
radious
Happening to me right now.
khaledh
It's up again, but response is slower than usual.
timack
I'm getting "Error 500" on Google URLs. Am in New Zealand.
bjd2385
Same in Boston, MA, US
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vlozko
Seeing the same issue up in Maine. Both from Safari and directly from google.com
bjd2385
Was just about to post this, I'm seeing issues.
alfiedotwtf
Had a few 502s, but then 500s.

... but now it's back

passive
It's slow and I'm getting 500s sometime. Nova Scotia, Canada
varenc
Still down for me. Sometimes getting this message:

   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.
kixiQu
Maps down for me. 500, specifically with a response document titled "Error 500 (Server Error)!!1"....
kbyatnal
"500. That’s an error" on all search queries
28194608
I'm getting "Error 500" on Google URLs. Am in Japan.
Kstarek
Down for me in NYC as well
teacpde
Maps seem to be impacted as well.