Associated Press

Wellington - Millions of people were cut off from Google's search engine, email and other online services on Wednesday, sparking a flurry of frustrated venting that served as a reminder of society's growing dependence on Google's technology.

The California-based company blamed the trouble on a glitch that routed too much of its traffic through computers in Asia, overwhelming its system so badly that about 14 percent of its users encountered problems with the internet's most popular search engine. The mistake also affected Google's email and several other services.

The outages lasted for about an hour, according to Urs Hoelzle, Google's senior vice-president of operations. Google's problems rippled around the web because other sites rely on its analytics service and draw much of their traffic from searches through Google. Many websites took twice as long to load and were twice as likely to fail during Google's disruption, according to Gomez, which helps internet companies manage their applications. “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,'' Hoelzle wrote.

“We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure a similar problem won't happen again.'' Before the repair, many people locked out from Google went elsewhere on the internet to express their dismay and despair. - The New Zealand Herald