Google outage on Friday took down Gmail

4:01 PM

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technology news

Google Inc suffered a service outage on Friday night that briefly took down Gmail, the email service used by hundreds of millions of people and many businesses across the globe.

Google outage on Friday  took down Gmai

Google, which first acknowledged the outage at 11:12am Pacific Time (1912 GMT), said a little over an hour later that the problem with Gmail had been resolved.

As of late Friday, the company did not offer an explanation for the outage, which affected users in at least India, Britain and the United States and prompted a stream of complaints on Twitter from users in many more countries.

"We're investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly," the company said on its "App Status" dashboard online, which tracks the state of various Google services.

Google Docs, the cloud-based productivity application that competes against Microsoft Corp's Office suite, also suffered a service disruption, according to the Google dashboard. Other Google properties, the social network Google Plus, and YouTube, appeared to load slowly as well.

Gmail, which includes calendar and chat features, has soared in popularity over the past decade to become one of Google's most successful product offerings. With more than 420 million users, it has begun to make small inroads against Microsoft Exchange in the battle to provide email services for corporate customers as well as individual consumers.

Yahoo Inc, which also runs a rival internet mail service, seized the moment to post a screenshot of the Gmail error page to Twitter. Yahoo later apologized for the barb and deleted the tweet.

Google users attempting to sign on saw a "temporary error" message and a brief note: "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes." 

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Google has begun redesigning of its homepage

11:35 PM

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technology news

BBC NEWS :Google has begun rolling out a redesign of its homepage - the world's most visited web address.

The revamp features a flattened, reshaped logo and replaces the previous menu bar with a smaller range of links on the page's right-hand side.

The move comes in the same month that Yahoo's logo and Microsoft's Bing search tool have also been updated.

A Google spokeswoman said that similar changes would now be "slowly rolled out" across its products.

A blog post added that the firm intended to "streamline" users' experience of its services to prevent "distractions".

It is the first change to Google's logo since 2010. Not all users will be able to see the redesign yet.

"This is the season for consumer tech updates and whether you sell a product or it's free everyone wants to look fresh ahead of the Christmas shopping season," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at the tech consultancy Forrester.

"What they are doing is actually pretty subtle and that's because these software companies depend on user loyalty - they don't want to do anything that would alienate their customers."

Another analyst suggested that cutting down the number of links would encourage people to use Google's social network, Google Plus.

To reveal other products - such as Google Drive storage, YouTube videos or the Android app Play Store - visitors to the firm's search page must now click on an icon made up of small squares.

"I do think that there is a move to try to make Google+ more central to everything its users do," said Carolina Milanesi from the tech advisors Gartner.

"It might be the case that it is not obvious to some people that they need to click on the box to reveal the firm's other services."

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Google went down for 5 minutes

10:33 PM

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technology news

NEW DELHI: Google's services, including the popular Google Search, suffered a rare outage on early Saturday morning. The outage was noticed around 4.20am IST and lasted for around 5 minutes. All Google services were disrupted. If a user tried to access Gmail or Google Search, the web browser returned 502 error. 

While the outage lasted just minutes, it caused a flurry of tweets on Twitter. 

"I wonder how many people checked their wifi connection first before realizing it was Google that was down," a Twitter user said. 

Around one hour later, GoSquared, a web analytics firm, said that it noticed a 40% dip in the pageviews. 

"Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 BST on 16th August 2013. This had a huge effect in the number of pageviews coming into GoSquared's real-time tracking — around a 40% drop, as this graph of our global pageviews per minute shows," noted GoSquared. "That's huge. As internet users, our reliance on google.com being up is huge." 

Google's services dashboard that monitors and shows the status of Google services had a pink dot in front of each one, indicating that they were offline for the said duration. Clicking on each dot, revealed a generic message confirming the outage. 

For example, the tab for Gmail noted, "We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior. We will provide an update by 8/17/13 6:07 AM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. The incident lasted 1-5 minutes." 

Around ten minutes after the outage was reported, Google engineers added to the dashboard that all problems had been resolved and the services were running fine.

Source : economictimes

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Tata Consultancy Services profit rises to Rs. 3,831 due to US demand

10:21 PM

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IT

Bangalore/Mumbai: Tata Consultancy Services , India's largest software services exporter, posted a 17 per cent rise in quarterly profit and maintained an upbeat outlook, fuelled by demand from the United States.

TCS's results, driven by its highest sales volume growth in seven quarters, reinforce expectations that Indian IT vendors will be helped by the strongest demand from US businesses since the end of the 2008-09 financial crisis.

The United States is the biggest market for India's $108 billion IT sector.

"Our pipeline is very very good, not only in the US but also elsewhere," chief executive N Chandrasekaran told reporters after the company released results for its financial first quarter.

TCS, part of the salt-to-steel Tata conglomerate, India's biggest business house, does not give a revenue forecast, but Mr Chandrasekaran maintained his earlier view that the company will grow faster than the industry.

That is typically taken to mean the industry lobby group National Association of Software and Services Companies' outlook for exports growth, pegged at a 12-14 per cent this financial year.

Consolidated net profit for the quarter ended June 30 rose to Rs. 3,831 crore from Rs. 3,280 crore a year earlier. That topped the Rs. 3,780 crore average of 24 analyst estimates, according to Thomson Reuters.

"I think demand should get a little bit better from here onwards. If the US economy is moving in the right direction in its own growth, then it definitely aids the Indian providers," said Kuldeep Koul, an analyst at ICICI Securities.

Sales rose 21 per cent over the year-earlier period to Rs. 17,990 crore and operating margins rose 50 basis points over the previous quarter to 26.9 per cent.

The US outlook for Indian IT outsourcers is clouded by pending immigration legislation that could make it more difficult and expensive to send workers there on temporary visas, an important element of the industry's business model.

Last week, rival Infosys posted-better-than expected results. Bangalore-based Infosys, which had lost ground to TCS in recent quarters, was cautiously optimistic about client spending on its services after beating profit estimates and retaining its sales forecast for the year ending in March.

TCS, whose customers include Citigroup, BP PLC, and AstraZeneca PLC, announced its results after the Mumbai markets closed. Its shares were down about 1 per cent compared with a 1 per cent gain in the overall index.

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