14% of Google’s user base experienced extremely slow services or none at all for about 90 minutes this week.  Google cited a server error began routing traffic through their servers and Russia consequently overloading it causing slow traffic or unavailable error messages.

Can you imagine trying to 50% of all of Googles packets through one server farm? No wonder my Gmail slowed down!

The outage occurred at 9:45am to about 11:20pm Central time in the United States.  The outage quickly made ripples on twitter and became known as #googlefail.

Google prides itself on reliability.  Imagine if an important business document was saved on Google Docs and you could not access it any other way, or your entire calendar for work is on Google and not synced with Outlook.  This little hiccup likely caused lost productivity, profits and lots of headaches around the world.

Really makes me re-analyze how much stock I put into online web tools and applications, though I have the utmost faith in Google.  (Bows down on knees in submission to ‘The Google’)