August 10, 2009

Google Sorry

Quite why Google Documents should be giving me this message when Gmail, Blogger, YouTube and various other Google services are all working normally I have no idea. This is particularly frustrating since it's OK for me to look at "documents" and "files", but apparently when it comes to "spreadsheets" I am a botnet and not to be trusted.

Clearly I'm on some sort of blacklist. For how long, who knows? This has been going on for four hours now. And one of the frustrating things about using Google's services is that it's absolutely impossible to get a human being to tell you what the heck is going on, or take some action about it. You can rely too much on automation (but hey, it keeps the margins up).

Going to rethink this one. The document I can't get access to is the PyCon 2010 budget. Google sorry? Google FAIL.

5 comments:

Antoine P. said...

It shows how dangerous it is to let a third-party company manage (storage of and access to) your data instead of doing it yourself. It's probably as risky as using proprietary formats (speaking of which, is Google Documents using open standards or its own closed formats?).

Regards

Antoine.

Fredrik said...

Could be this:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=7ffb50af4aeb5a0a&hl=en

(sorry if you got multiple copies of this; the openid integration seems to be horriby confused today)

Steve said...

@Antoine: Well that's a point that's been made before, but it's one that I felt was worth repeating. Fortunately the block has now been raised, with no more ill effects than an outage of any other service.

Frustrating, but as Fredrik's reply indicates I could probably have done more to help myself. Some days there just isn't time.

Anonymous said...

I got one of those yesterday, too! I was searching for something and the top search result was a link to a blogger post, which Google wouldn't let me get to via its own result list. At least the cached version was available.

Kenneth said...

Is it still doing that?