Ask HN: What's going on at google? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's going on at google?

60 pointsoscardelben58 comments

It seems to me that some google services are not working properly lately.

For example I have some problems using safari with gmail (wont open at all) and with google groups (infinte redirects between their login system). The only way I can browse those google services is by using chrome.

But except for those browser specific issues, services like feedburner are driving us crazy. Feedburner counter is incorrect every other day, showing google reader subscribers one day and forgetting about it the other. Every blogger I talked with is annoyed by this problem. This specific problem has been bothering us for many weeks now, and I suspect there's nobody working on it.

Am I the only one who has noticed issues like these lately (except for feedburner which is not working for everyone)?

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I had the Google Groups infinite redirect happening last week. Cleared my session and cookies, and that seemed to fix it.

Same thing happened to me just yesterday (6/22/10). Clearing the session and cookies solved it for me as well.

Are you using safari 5? I have the same issue from time to time on AWS and Google since Safari 5

I was using Google Chrome (on Ubuntu Lucid).

Same and same, plus with Chromium daily snapshots.

I can browse google groups again after resetting cookies etc (not just cache), but I still can't access gmail, neither via http nor https.

It does feel like there's been a lack of polish of late. Main things that bug me are that AdWords keeps telling me to upgrade to Safari 4 from Safari 5 and the redirect loop on Google Groups that inevitably results in a page telling me I'm a bot sending automated queries.

The redirect loop in Google Groups happen to me too ... yesterday I could only read the groups I'm subscribed to by being logged-out (as it happens only when I'm logged-in).

My google complaints:

* Any public google group gets flooded with spam

* I get NRA spam that gets through gmail's spam filter every time even though I mark it as spam. I'm not the only one. Apple mail correctly flags it but google is oblivious. Whatever they're doing, I'm surprised other people aren't doing it too.

On a side note: my hypothesis is that if google ever dies, it will go out the way Sun did.

Purchased by Larry Ellison? That's a terrifying thought.

Indeed. Larry's motto appears to be: I don't think I'm all that evil.

And that guy had/has a Maserati Problem too!

You can monitor the status of google's apps here: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en

Good find. I'm wondering if this is worldwide or just the US?

Gmail has been amazingly slow and timing out for me a lot lately (Chrome/Linux). The rest of the apps (and Gmail through Android) seem to be fine.

I can't access GMail via IMAP today. Started at 5:15 AM EST.

Google Apps accounts are fine; this is only consumer GMail.

And yes, I've been having problems with GMail, FeedBurner, and Docs with escalating frequency.

IMAP went down for me over a month ago. Gave up.

As of FeedBurner you should check FeedBurner status feed: http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-feedfetc...

I can confirm I had really slow gmail yesterday. Works well today. I'm based in Prague / Central Europe

Infinite redirects happen to me sometimes when I switch (log-out, log-in) accounts -> my wife and I use the same computer at home. When that happens, I have to clear cookies and browser cache and then it starts working ok.

I've noticed this happens if you log-in then log-out before the page is finished loading (including G-chat, etc.) When you try to log-in again, it often does the infinite redirect. Of course, there may be other causes as well.

For 3 days, Google Buzz mobile loads, but the Ajax refresh just spins, and never loads new content. Posting also fails. Mail works fine mostly. This is on the iPad.

I also noticed something weird with Google lately. Even when I'm signed into my google account, if I go to youtube, it asks me to sign in. When I click the sign in link and use my google/youtube account, it redirects me to the "Do you already have a YouTube Account?" page where I can log in ,which doesn't work, or create a new account. WTF?

For at least four months the AdSense landing page has had an apologetic message explaining why you have to log in again even though you are already logged into your Google account. Really wondering if Google engineers have extremely short attention spans when it comes to 'old' projects,

It's definitely been ropey. My own hunch was that it was not browser related, but to do with their rollout of Caffeine - either maintenance on other products has been taking a back seat, or lower priority searches (from users' pages rather than google.com) are not being handled as quickly, but sit parked in the stack above other things - sort of like the situation a while back where sometimes you'd visit a site and pages would stall due to an endless wait from Google analytics).

There's more to this thought, but it's still basically a hunch and I don't want to waste 15 minutes on it. I just hope they designate July Quality Control Month.

Last week Google's jQuery hosting went down: http://www.seangw.com/wordpress/index.php/2010/06/google-cod...

Why is the common denominator to these problems Safari? Any thoughts?

Just an idea here - Safari 5 now pre-caches DNS requests for links on a page. Is it possible that Google is doing some DNS-fu to load balance across multiple data centers that causes strange issues like the infinite redirects because there is a delay between when the DNS request was cached and the user clicks on the link?

I see same issues with Chrome. Infinite redirect, slow gmail.

I've noticed problems lately with Gmail in Safari on the iPod Touch, and the Reader app has always had problems on the Touch. For what it's worth, I'm in the US Northeast.

I've noticed some problems with the interfaces of some of the apps, like voice and gmail, not functioning properly unless I reload. It's particularly bad on voice, I can't get it to make a call about 30% of the time because the buttons are broken.

edit and I'm getting tired of having to relogin to half of the widgets on my www.google.com/ig page three or four times a day because they aren't tracking my sessions properly.

I've seen the same issue intermittently with gmail and calendar under Firefox 3.6, even though I'm properly logged in to iGoogle and reader...

Chrome bookmark sync malfunctioned and I lost 400 bookmarks because it only backed up a 100 of my 500 bookmarks. It just dumped 400 bookmarks but luckily I had backed them up a few weeks back so I ended up only losing 100 bookmarks.

Also Chrome sometimes loops the sound from a flash video after I close a tab.

I emailed the Chrome team about these issues but no response.

and why do so many of google's properties not work in chrome? like adsense? and google analytics (well some days it works, others it doesn't)

and gmail is slow. and calendar is unavailable half the time.

if people are having problems with safari, it might be a webkit issue since i'm seeing the same issues in chrome.

oh and don't get me started on their contact sync with the iphone

Chrome seems to have had quite a few issues lately. Had a few reports of it not working with Mibbit. The Chrome developer channel build seems better, so hopefully that'll solve some things.

Google App Engine has also been performing poorly (http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/datastore-perfor...). I wonder if these performance issues may be related.

For the login-related problems with Safari, it should help to empty its cache.

You're not the only one.

Google Docs export functionality was also broken all yesterday, resulting in an infinite redirect loop upon download.

Monday and Tuesday the iPod Touch's mail app wouldn't sync with Gmail. It started working again last night.

Bah. Come here to Turkey and see what can possibly go wrong with Google :)

(Just ignore me. )

I've also gotten the infinite redirect on occasion, when trying to log into GMail (firefox)

Why not send email to google customer support, and ask them, if you are genuinely interested in knowing?

Google doesn't have customer support.

I mean to say that if one is genuinely interested in solving a problem, ranting/cribbing in front of people who cannot do much, instead of bringing the issue up with the source of the problem, is rarely an effective solution.

The guy was just expressing his opinion. What the fuck is with all the downvotes, HN?

Did the karma requirement for earning downvote privileges get reduced?

I might as well limit myself to Reddit. Same attitude, more content.

He is not google's customer.

We're all Google's customers. The majority of us just don't write them a check.

Most of us are not Google's customers. We are the raw materials google uses to fabricate a product to sell.

No, we're google's products. The advertisers are their customers.

Are you a "customer" if you exchange something of value for a service?

I think you are. By this definition, I am a customer of Google, as is anyone in this thread who uses a Google service.

But I am not the final arbiter of meaning. The downvotes to my comment show that I am clearly wrong on this subject.

Well, by that definition, Google can also be considered your customer. Or any vendor can also be considered their customer's customer.

I don't think I understand what you mean... Do you mean swapping the roles via inverting the sense of "giver of something of value" and "provider of service"? As in:

"I provide Google the service of access to my personal data, and they give me use of Gmail as a payment, therefore Google is my customer."

"I provide my vendor the service of access to currency, and they give me a product as a payment, therefore my vendor is my customer."

That seems like a stretch, so I must be missing something.

No, I'm just saying that it's a very vague way of defining a customer/vendor.

I've been getting these infinite loops at login in gmail about once a week now. It's getting ridiculous. Google, please fix this. Sometimes clearing cookies doesn't even help

I don't think you're wrong per-se… I think that's one way of looking at it and is the way preferred by most people. It's nice to be a customer. You have power and control.

In this case, I would argue that you're bartering your attention for a service. To me the word customer implies an exchange of money - almost by definition. As I mentioned in my raw materials comment, Google turns around and sells your attention to advertisers: their real customers. They need you, but not in the same way they need their customers.

I voted your comment back to 1. I don't agree with your viewpoint, but I don't think it's a wrong viewpoint.

Using Chrome and google reader, after listening to an mp3 in a feed, many times the UI locks up and the page has to be reloaded to make it usable again.

A while back, the online applications stopped working for me in anything but Chrome (well, I refused to try IE). I haven't tried again, lately (so, another Google win?).

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