News19,135 Articles

September 27, 2006

Server failure makes Google unavailable

US web users unable to search

Grant Gross and Juan Carlos Perez

The failure of a DNS (domain name system) server at Comcast caused problems for some web surfers in the north east section of the US yesterday, making several websites, including Google, inaccessible.

The server failure caused connectivity problems for a 'few hours', said Jeanne Russo, a Comcast spokeswoman. By late yesterday, the broadband provider had rerouted traffic to other servers, she said.

An undetermined number of Google users who subscribe to Comcast's broadband service "experienced problems accessing Google and other services for a short period of time", a Google spokesman said via email.

"Google engineers helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information to the ISP. We believe the issue has since been resolved by the ISP," the spokesman wrote.

The server was knocked offline because of a hardware failure, Russo said. She couldn't exactly how many web pages were unavailable to Comcast users, but said that the problem was confined to "a number of sites". The problems were "very isolated, very random", she added.

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