Millions of people were cut off from Google Inc.'s search engine, e-mail and other online services Thursday, sparking a flurry of frustrated venting that served as a reminder of society's growing dependence on Google's technology. The Mountain View-based company blamed the trouble on a glitch that routed too much of its traffic through computers in Asia, overwhelming its system so badly that about 14 percent of its users encountered problems with the Internet's most popular search engine. The mistake also affected Google's e-mail and several other services. Google's problems rippled around the Web because other sites rely on its analytics service and also draw much of their traffic from searches done through Google. Many Web sites took twice as long to load and were twice as likely to fail during Google's disruption, according to Gomez Inc., which helps Internet companies manage their applications. Because Google is used by hundreds of millions of people, even a breakdown affecting a small percentage of its audience can have a huge impact. Google's search engine, by far the most popular on the Internet, fields more than 9 billion monthly search requests in the United States alone. Although its search engine is renowned for its reliability, Google isn't fail-safe. Its 5-year-old e-mail service, in particular, has been susceptible to periodic outages.
