Google Compute Engine, AOL Mail Suffer Early Morning Outages

Today started with a pair of outages. Google Compute Engine suffered downtime across multiple zones lasting roughly an hour, while AOL Mail suffered an extended outage most of the morning.

Google Compute Engine Outage

A network issue around midnight Pacific caused loss of connectivity to multiple zones, with the company updating users on the cloud outage roughly every half hour.

Google said problems were resolved shortly after 1 a.m. A detailed analysis is pending following internal investigation, with network issues blamed as the culprit.

The cloud outage was technically during off-peak hours, but in today’s global connected economy, there’s no such thing as "off peak."

Google Compute Engine suffered problems with its load balancing service for 3 hours in January, with customers unable to create forwarding rules.

Google's Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud had a total of 4.5 hours of downtime last year across more than 70 outages, according to CloudHarmony. The outage this morning was on the long side.

CloudHarmony said Amazon Web Services was the most reliable IaaS cloud last year, with 2.4 hours of downtime total.

AOL Mail Down

AOL's email service suffered a widespread outage beginning around 4 a.m. Eastern. The outage appears to have been resolved, although some customers still report ongoing issues.

While AOL is past its heyday in the 90s, a big discussion flared up in 2011 about an AOL email address acting as a status symbol. The unfashionable domain became temporarily fashionable, with a certain prestige attached. Part of it was identifying executives and other big shots still using AOL email addresses as early adopters with nothing to prove to anyone. Part of it was ironic usage.

AOL has not disclosed the cause of the problem yet, other than claiming there was a network issue.