Google Knocked Offline Saturday, But Not A Hack

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May 09, 2005 (1:17 PM EDT)

By TechWeb Technology News

Google was off-line for a short time Saturday evening due to an undisclosed DNS problem.

The search service was unavailable from 6:45 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT, Saturday, May 7, Google acknowledged. Some users were unable to reach google.com for longer periods as individual DNS servers took different amounts of time to update once Google fixed its end.

"Google's global properties were unavailable for a short period of time," Google spokesman David Krane told the Associated Press and various Google-specific bloggers, on Saturday. "We've remedied the problem and access to Google has been restored."

Krane denied that the problem was caused by a hack or other attack, and only said it was related to the DNS, or Domain Name System. Some security firms have recently warned of DNS cache poisoning attacks as a way for phishers to make their identity thievery less detectable.

Talk of a hack was fueled by users who reported being diverted to SoGoSearch.com during the Google outage. Additional investigation, however, found that that site had registered the domain com.net, and when some browsers were unable to resolve google.com, they tried google.com.net.

Other Google services, such as Gmail, were also offline for a time on Saturday.

The Google snafu came just days after the company debuted an acceleration tool that speeds up searches and Web page requests. Now, however, Google has closed down the beta of Web Accelerator. On the site where users could download the utility last week, Google now states: "Thank you for your interest in Google Web Accelerator. We have currently reached our maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support."