Google: Traffic Jam in Asia caused Outage

For some of you, Google related services temporarily came to a screeching halt yesterday, leaving those unread and unsent emails in limbo. We experienced it too, even though www.downforyeveryoneorjustme.com had us second guessing whether not user error was to blame. It wasn't, and Google confirmed the massive outage, attributing the downtime to a data "traffic jam" in Asia.

"An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam," Google wrote on its blog. "As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions."

Google went on to call the incident "especially embarrassing," noting that it has been working hard to make its services both ultra-fast and 'always on.'

While the search giant also said it's "working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again," this isn't the first outage to occur. Various outages have occurred on at least three different occasions last year.