It looks like Google has been having some problems over the past 24 hours. This afternoon I logged into Google analytics and saw a sharp decline in my blog traffic. Until I read about the outage on Techcrunch I figured it was due to the timing of my blog posts yesterday. Well apparently it wasn’t my fault. Supposedly there has been reported outages on other Google sites including Gmail and Google Finance.

Since the outage, it looks like things are beginning to return to normal. I have noticed some of my missing stats returning to my analytics account. I have a significant amount of trust in Google products, but maybe this just shows how even large internet corporations have difficulty creating reliable web applications that are consistently up. I have even gone as far to suggest that some of my clients use google’s “Google Apps for Your Domain” to manage their entire communications backed including email and calendar rather than Microsoft Exchange. Conversely, it’s not like Microsoft Exchange doesn’t experience a little downtime here and there. Oh well, I guess it’s just part of the troubles we have to deal with when we become dependent on technology.