Apologies due all around
By JOHN MURRELL
In the long march of Internet progress, there are going to be "Eureka!" days and "Oops!" days. Thursday was an "Oops!" day, marked by public apologies from two of the biggest names in Web services: Google, for the palpitations caused by its clogged arteries, and Twitter, for handling a technical change in a tone-deaf fashion.
The Google event was the equivalent of, oh, say a 4.5 quake — strong enough to knock some cans off the shelves and crack some windows without any major damage, and, because we don't think of Google as quake country, startling enough to send people pouring into the virtual streets in confusion. For a couple of hours, a significant minority of users got a quick reminder of how thoroughly Google sites and services have become woven into our daily business. In the end, Google's excuse had a very Silicon Valley ring to it: a traffic tie-up. "An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam," explained Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations. "As a result, about 14 percent of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and 'always on,' so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again." If the quake analogy holds, the shaken victims will spend the next few days talking about how they really ought to make some preparations for a Big One, then gradually slide back into the comfortable illusion of security.
Over at Twitter, co-founder Biz Stone couldn't blame traffic for the user backlash that followed what he considered a rather minor change in the options for seeing tweeted replies, although he did sound a little run down after a couple days of careening attempts to get things back under control. Instead, he fell on his own fountain pen, taking the blame for a poor presentation of the change. "We removed a setting that 3 percent of all accounts had ever touched, but for those folks it was beloved. The use cases that folks loved about this setting will return in a new and improved form," he wrote in a blog post. "We screwed up from a communications perspective this week. When I heard that this change was going out, I rushed to write a blog post. This setting had both product design flaws as well as technical flaws and I did not do my homework. My post came from a product design perspective but the technical perspective was the reason it went away so quickly. Normally, I spend more time understanding the issue before explaining it on this blog but in my haste I made a mistake." Here, too, there will probably be a spate of post-event resolutions among the management, but we'll have to wait to see if they stick or fade.
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