Googlers googless in the land of Tango

SCRIBBLERS worldwide increasingly depend on Google, whether it is to find L'INQs for our stories, or simply to check our GMail accounts. Today, access was impossible for this hack typing from the land of Tango.

About two hours ago, I realised access from my ADSL link passing through PRIMA - one of Argentina's largest independent ISPs from media conglomerate Clarin - to Google.com, Google.com.ar, even mail.google.com, was impossible.

After a quick SSH session to one of my linux shell accounts sitting North of the Great Wall of Mexico, I found that my ISP's local DNS servers were giving out different IP addresses to www.google.com than the DNS servers up North.

IP addresses returned by local DNS servers did not match the ones from North American DNS servers
and the IP addresses returned by local DNS were not answering http requests

For the record, I was trying to load Google's pages from subnet 200.122.36.x, and the local DNS servers returned 64.233.161.x as the IP address for www.google.com, whereas the North American DNS servers returned 66.102.7.x addresses for the same www.google.com domain name, at the same time. The good news is that this outage seems to have just fixed by now, around 3:25pm local time (GMT-3), just around the same time when this scribbler was about to start head-butt the walls in desperation with his bald head like the Zidane of World Cup fame, after having to do a couple web searches with that other ancient "Y" search engine out there.

Sources also confirmed the outage was suffered from other local ISPs, for instance from fibre-network provider IPLAN and said the "unreacheable" and "timeout" errors were felt today since around 11:00am local time (GMT-3) and affected not only www.google.com but also www.mozilla.org. Strangely, the outage did not affect blogger.com while it lasted.

We hope Google designs a way to contact the company about service outages, from a different web site that sits on a different domain name and a completely different IP subnet. A good old-fashioned phone number would be nice, too. µ

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