Google App Engine Broken For 4 Hours And Counting

A little over two hours ago, a Google employee posted a note in this Google Groups thread indicated that Google App Engine was “seeing elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as nwell as elevated serving error-rates.” He noted that the problem began around 6:30 AM Pacific time and that the team was looking into it. A few minutes later he updated that Google App Engine was going into “unplanned maintenance mode” — over 4 hours later it’s still not back up.

That’s a long time for any service to be broken, but especially one that is the backbone for many startup’s web app. What’s worse is that while Google is updating the Google Groups thread, the actual App Engine Status page has been down the entire time as a result of the problems, so people are going there for updates and seeing nothing.

The last update from Google came about an hour ago:

Read-only mode continues. Elevated latency and error-rates persist for Datastore reads. Memcache writes have been reenabled to better soak read-only load. Our engineering teams are looking into the root cause of the problem. Will post more information as soon as it’s available.

Obviously, the natives are getting restless on Twitter. This outage follos the popular hosting service Rackspace experiencing some rare downtime earlier this week.

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