Article by George Norman

On 15 May 2009

There are good news and bad news to report from the Mountain View search engine giant. Starting with the good news, because we are the glass half full kind of people, the Beta version of the Chrome browser has been updated – Chrome Beta 2.0.172.27 has been released and is available for download. The bad news is that Google suffered an outage on Thursday, the 14th of May. Internauts found themselves unable to access Google.com, YouTube.com, and other Google owned domains.

The Chrome 2.0.172.27 Beta update that Google released comes with several bug fixes and enhanced translation functionality. Google Chrome Program Manager, Mark Larson , explains: “Google Chrome 2.0.172.27 has been released to the Beta channel. This release adds translations for all new features in all supported languages. We've made a number of fixes to improve reliability and updated the version of Gears to 0.5.19.0.”


The languages Google Chrome offers support for are: Arabic, Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English UK, English US, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kanada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish, Spanish for Latin America, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

If you would like to get Chrome 2.0.172.27 Beta, a download location is available here .

Moving on to the Google outage, on the 14th of May users from all over the world were unable to access Google owned domains (like YouTube and Google News) and the main Google web page (Google.com). This would make Gmail’s 4th outage this year since it too was affected (previous outages occurred in February , March , and last week ). Google acknowledged the issue and provided an explanation.

“An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% 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,” said SVP of Operations, Urs Hoezle .

The problem has been remedied and all Google web services work properly now.



Tags: Google, Google News, YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Beta, Update, Outage

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