1 post tagged “things that make you go hmm”

I noticed, while stumbling around the web this morning, that the Dodgeball website was down.  (The actual mobile service seems to still be up.)

"That's odd", I thought.  I had never actually seen a Google service just fall off the map, even for a short length of time.  Nothing that couldn't be fixed with a quick reload, anyhow.

Two Four Six Nine hours later, the site is still down.  This is curious, and leads me to a few possible conclusions.  More than one relates to the very public blowup of the Dodgeball founders leaving Google.

This could be taken as easily visible evidence of the lack of support Dens was referring to when he said (boldface mine):

It's no real secret that Google wasn't supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn't convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.

The other possibility is that Google is, indeed, leaving Dodgeball on the vine to die.  This very well may be a serious system problem, but with the founders gone, there may be even less motivation to put resources towards it.  Whoever is stuck fixing this is undoubtedly swamped.

There is a third possibility that something is deeply wrong with Google's operations group's monitoring/paging tools - and I've certainly suffered a few outages at work because of similar problems - but that's almost more troubling.