Google’s Site Reliability Team: Ask Them Anything!

The Google Site Reliability Team is currently taking questions over at Reddit. “We make Google’s websites work. Ask Us Anything!”  Participants include Site Reliability Engineers Kripa Krishnan, Cody Smith, Dave O’Connor and John Collins.

Among the questions: When was the last time Google’s main page was down? “Home page outages almost never affect all users simultaneously,” Smith writes. “There are many different systems involved in simply connecting users to Google, and most incidents happen outside of our network. We do occasionally have network outages, which are regional, e.g. a few states or countries. We also occasionally introduce language-specific bugs, e.g. garbling CJK. As far as I can recall, the last global outage was back in 2005.”

They’ll be wrapping up soon, but readers interested in wading through the AMA will find some interesting insights into how Google manages web reliability.