Google: Personalized home page glitch solved

IDG News Service - Google Inc. has finally solved a technical glitch on its Personalized Home Page service that caused problems for an undetermined number of users.

Anecdotal evidence from discussion forums indicates that Google began rolling out a fix to the problem at around 3 a.m. EDT today, almost 24 hours after the problem erupted, although the glitch seemed to still be affecting some users Friday afternoon.

The company didn't declare the problem solved until almost 2 p.m., about 32 hours after problem reports started surfacing. "A number of Google users had difficulty accessing their settings and preferences on the personalized version of their homepages over the past day," a spokeswoman wrote via e-mail. "Users should have their personalized homepages restored at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our users. We know how important Google Personalized Homepage is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously."

In the statement, Google didn't disclose how many users were affected, nor did it explain what happened.

Personalized Home Page is a free service that lets users turn Google.com into a customized portal by adding to it syndicated content feeds, as well as "gadget" applications -- effectively turning it into a user's hub for Web content, online services and applications.

The problem erupted at around 6 a.m. EDT Thursday, when angry users began flocking to discussion forums to report that their home pages had either reverted to old versions or to their original default settings.

Users complained about lost productivity and missing data, but throughout Friday morning many reported in discussion forums that their Google home pages had been restored. Some, however, said the problem wasn't fixed until after 1 p.m.

In a number of forum postings, users called on Google to explain the reason for the problem and to let them save their Personalized Home Page settings to their PCs, so that the settings can be restored even if they get wiped out on Google servers.

Episodes such as this one have affected other Google services recently, leading some to question the company's ability to provide robust availability for its online services, particularly those for which it offers uptime guarantees, like the paid version of Google Apps, the suite of hosted communication and collaboration applications for businesses of all sizes.

Earlier this week, Google backtracked on a plan to do a 13-hour upgrade to its Google Calendar service, which is part of Google Apps, apparently after a significant number of Google Apps administrators expressed concern at the possible impact of the maintenance work on availability during a weekday and during U.S. work hours.

Incidents like the one affecting Personalized Home Page could undermine arguments made by those who back the use of hosted services to deliver applications over the Web. Google is one of the most vocal proponents of the software-as-a-service model, which rivals the traditional approach of having users install applications on their own PCs and servers.

In March, the Gmail portion of Google Apps suffered three major outages, affecting even subscribers who had signed up for the fee-based version of the suite, which guarantees 99.9% uptime.