BREAKING: Major Internet Outage in China, Now In The US? Gmail, Google Plus Affected

This week many huge internet sites like baidu.com went down in China. Now a US company is facing similar problems: Google. Many Google services including Google Mail, Google Plus and some other services are affected

Update: We’ll update you on this as the story develops

China’s Leading Sites Down, Stocks Plunging

BAIDU and SINA Corp, two major players in China were affected by outages this week. Although, outages sporadically occur, it is very uncommon that multiple major players like Baidu and Google are affected in the same week. Bloomberg speculates that the “great Chinese internet firewall” was responsible for the outage.

In the past, Facebook suffered outages from time to time, sometimes lasting up to 2 hours. Usually the outtimes are caused by bugs or internal maintenance issues (datacenters, security, attacks), but they are usually fixed quickly. Facebook and Google have huge teams and can address problems very quickly

What’s Next?

Hopefully this internet outage will only last hours and the affected companies can recover quickly. It would be truly unimaginable if this was just a pre-cursor to a global internet outage caused by hackers. An internet outage would hit the recovering global economy very badly.

So far, it looks only Google is affected and it is very likely that it’s an internal problem that will be resolved eventually. However, it’s still a very odd coincidence, don’t you think?