Search engine giant Google caused a global slowdown of the internet earlier today when an internal error caused millions of websites to slow down. The issue affected almost all the services provided by Google including Gmail, Google News, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google AdSense, and Google Search.
Google have blamed the fault on a routing error that caused their servers to direct traffic via Asia which caused a bit of a traffic jam as the western world went to Asia and back.
This is another frustrating reminder of how so many websites are tied into the mountain view factory, my own website was experiencing delays while browsers tried to access the analytics’s javascript from the Google servers. This has once again brought up that question of do we rely too heavily on Google and its services?
When an error by a third party causes a major issue with your website resulting in a delayed page load, would you continue to use them and their services? Or is it because the fault was caused by Google we should just ignore it?
I was showing a friend around my website at the time the fault was occurring and pages were taking a long time to load, but when we browsed the site via chrome the page didn’t load at all, I put it down to the internet connection in my office as it sometimes plays up and a lot of other sites were loading slowly. If I had been showing a potential customer around my site or I ran an e-commerce website this would have been a critical blow to my business, in terms of potential sales and what impression would my slow loading website give?
The main cause of the slowdown was due to the analytics and adsence code. As Google host these on their own servers each website that has it installed has to make a call to the Google servers to download the javascript files, as most browsers don’t render a page until it has received the html code, this results in a blank screen if there is an issue including a remote file.
I think we need to change the way we include remote files, I for one am going to change the way my site uses the analytics code so I use an ajax request to trigger the javascript rather than including it on the page. I have noticed lots of sites pause when trying to load analytics in the past and this way my site will continue to work even if Google send my visitors on a trip around the world.
