Yeah, it's happening now, worldwide.  World at a standstill.

Are we relying on Google too much???

UPDATE:  More than a few people on Twitter did what *I* did — i.e., tried to find out about Google outage by searching "google outage"…. except they searched on Google.  Duh!

It does pose an interesting dilemna: how do you find out about Google problems when Google is having problems.  We really do rely on it too much.  (Oh, sure, there's Yahoo search, and Twitter, but they're stone age by comparison…)

UPDATE 2:  Problem apparently affect Google search, Google News, Gmail, and anything that syncs with Google, including YouTube and Blogger.

UPDATE 3 (11:40 am EST):  As far as I can tell, this CNET article is the only thing in the media confirming the outage, but it says it is over.  Not!!

UPDATE 4 (12:02 pm EST):  CNET still the only one reporting this, in a new article:

Many people found Google's search site was extremely slow or inaccessible Thursday, and other reports pointed to troubles with other properties including YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Docs, AdSense, and Blogger.

Judging by a Twitter search for the #googlefail hashtag, the problem was international in scope, though it wasn't immediately clear how universal the problems were. Google didn't immediately comment for this story, though it did confirm an earlier Google News outage that lasted about three and a half hours.

Google is central to the online lives–and livelihood–of many, and an outage shows exactly how central it's become–and not just through its primary business, search.

"The Internet dies without Google. Can't get to my bank Web site because it's waiting on 'google-analytics.com.' This is made of lame," said Twitter user Tadiera.

I also note (from Twitter) that may people are turning to Yahoo Search "for the first time in [7,8,9…] years"

UPDATE 5 (12:12 pm):  Readwriteweb has more info:

We have seen our fair share of failures from web based products, but this morning, for a large number of users (at least in the U.S.), it looks like every Google service has been either wiped off the Internet or is running extremely slow for a large number of users. Even Google Search is only creeping along slowly right now, and YouTube, Google Reader, Blogger, Google Analytics, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Apps are pretty much unavailable as well.

Typically, these outages have never lasted for long, but once again, this outage shows how depended we have become on Google for so many of our daily tasks.

As of now, all of our attempts to contact any Google property are timing out, but we'll keep you posted once we find out more about this.

Update: Judging from the comments here and the conversations we are tracking on Twitter, it looks like these outages are somewhat localized, though we haven't seen any patterns evolve yet. It does seem, though, like the outages are mostly in the U.S., though we are also seeing some reports from European users, while Google seems to be working just fine in most Asian countries.

Currently, this looks like a networking issue, as users on some ISPs are able to access all of Google's services, while their neighbors are unable to connect to Google's servers.

The comments to this article are interesting.  There's a person in Boston saying it's down, and another person in Boston saying "no problem here"

FINAL (?) UPDATE (12:16 pm EST):  Googlefail is over.  Over for me, and for lots of others….

ANOTHER FINAL UPDATE (12:24 pm):  Who's to blame — f***in' AT&T.

Maybe I'll bookmark the Internet Storm Center, now that I know it exists, for future problems.

And now that Google's back, you can Google "google outage may 2009" and see that I'm the #1 search result…. which is why this blog is getting slammed (for me) right now.