Google News is down
May 14th, 2009 - 8:07 pm ICT by adminBy Sajal Kayan
Google’s news service located at http://news.google.com went down today at approximately 8:40 am EDT. At the time of writing at 9:00 am EDT it is still down.
On visiting news.google.com one would be greeted with a 503 Server error, which asks the visitor to try again in 30 seconds. The error Reads:-
Server Error
The service you requested is not available yet.
Please try again in 30 seconds.
At the time of writing, the Google news blog at http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/ has no comments about the outage. It is highly unlikely that this outage was due to planed/scheduled maintenance since it occurred in the morning hours when the people at American East Coast were just entering office. Earlier, the Google “MayHarm” bug also occured during similar time-frame.
HTTP error 503 is defined as “Service Unavailable”. Normal server error is 500 “Internal Server Error”.
According to Wikipedia :-
Google News is an automated news aggregator provided by Google Inc. The initial idea, StoryRank—related to Google’s PageRank formula—was developed by Krishna Bharat in 2001, the Principal Research Scientist of Google. No human is involved in the altering of the front page or story promotion, beyond tweaking the aggregation algorithm. Google News left beta in January 2006.
//Edit 9:23 am. news.google.com works if accessing it from the Google Data center located at 209.85.153.104 . The issue is limited to certain data centers. Not all users are affected by this. In this case, the ip belongs to Google’s data center in India.
//Edit 9:49 am (EDT) : We noticed Google News operational from all Locations we were tracking at about 9:35am EDT.
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Tags: 503 server error, aggregation, algorithm, american east coast, blogspot, error 503, front page, google, google inc, initial idea, internal server error, kayan, krishna bharat, news service, pagerank, principal research scientist, scheduled maintenance, time frame, tweaking, wikipedia