You can't fault any service for not being capable of providing 100% uptime; but you also can't help but notice the shockwaves when that one-tenth-of-one-percent comes around. This morning, Google is acknowledging that users throughout yesterday had difficulty accessing its Google News server, although it is not calling the event an outright outage.

News publishers whose promotional models rely upon Google News received notices from Google yesterday afternoon saying that users began having access difficulties at about 12:30 pm PDT (3:30 EDT) yesterday. Betanews is capable of tracking its own readership, along with referral sources, on a minute-to-minute basis; and we could actually see the event as though we were watching a seismometer. Assuming our instrumentation is accurate, our traffic from Google News began plummeting almost three hours earlier than this report, at about 1:00 pm EDT. Referral traffic from Google News began resuming its normal pattern at about 5:30.

Although Yahoo News typically receives 2.6 times the traffic of Google News, according to recent comScore estimates (42.3 million readers versus 16.2 million visitors last February), Yahoo is in reality a publisher and re-publisher of news from press sources, and actually does some of its own reporting in certain niches. Google News is a traffic redirection service which leads readers directly to sources, and news sites including those that get more traffic than Google News itself still rely upon Google News to help send readers their direction. Smaller Web publishers actually collect more readers through Google News than their own home pages.

But Google News is almost completely automated, which can mean that it takes enough small Web publishers complaining about traffic dips before administrators can act. Again, assuming our indicators are correct, the time between the start of the traffic event and the time Google was able to acknowledge it, was about three hours. A large news publisher that is not so automated may have been able to acknowledge and respond to a similar event sooner.