In a blog post on Arbor Networks’ Security to the Core site you can really see what a fail whale is (fail whale being the phrase commonly used to refer to Twitter outages, but on Thursday used to describe Google’s outage). This graphic from Arbor’s security research team shows average traffic on tier 1/2 ISPs in North America Wednesday morning and does indeed look like a whale.
Google said in a brief and cryptic blog post that its “embarrassing…glitch” affected about 14% of customers and was caused by a routing issue of some sort. The outage generated oodles of buzz online everywhere from Twitter to NANOG.
