Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Calendar Is Down

calendar.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 191 posts

Re: Google Calendar Is Down

#121

Post by CloudNetworking »

yegle wrote: post #93
chipperyman573 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just ping the servers once a minute and tell if they're up or not. No need to know why they've gone down.

That only indicate the frontend of the service is up and potentially running. Being about to respond to ping and being able to serve HTTP request are two different things, and being able to serve HTTP request vs a fully functional website are two different things. Think about wrong SSL certification, wrong domain mapping between frontend/backend, broken JS/CSS etc.

This outage is a great example. I can ping Google Calendar servers and I get an HTTP response. SSL also works like a charm.

And yet everybody agrees it's down.

Re: Google Calendar Is Down

#122

Post by agentdrtran »

manigandham wrote: post #54

This is especially chaotic for business GSuite users. Wonder if there's an offline/local cache service available for cloud-hosted systems, that would be a good middle-ground between local control and cloud-backed scale.

Checker Plus caches calendar entries offline.

Re: Google Calendar Is Down

#123

Post by yeahitslikethat »

brandmeyer wrote: post #95
ma2rten wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at google. I am pretty sure google calendar data is not used for ads targeting. The same is true for gmail.

I used to work at Google. Its a big company, composed of almost 10^5 employees today. In my experience, they can be trusted to adhere to the letter of their agreements; no more and no less. That's not as bad as it might sound. Plenty of companies consider their contracts to be far more mutable than Google did while I was there. But it does mean that you can't take any individual employee's word about what they are do…

I see!!! This is the kind of eyes wide shut you folks use to justify working there!

It's so gross.

Re: Google Calendar Is Down

#124

Post by dpcan »

ma2rten wrote: post #100
opencl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Google made any public statements about whether or not calendar data is used for ad targeting? Gmail was used for ad targeting until mid-2017[1] but I haven't seen anything about calendar. [1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

Afaik, it was never used for ad targeting so there was no announcement to make. Just think about it for minute. What percentage of people actively use Google Calendar? Out of those what percentage put useful information in there? How much commercial value does this information have?

Are you serious?

If I put "Go fishing" into my calendar for next Monday, Google knows:

1) This person fishes.

2) This person probably buys fishing related products.

3) We know this person lives in X and fishes there, and business Y has a website selling similar products.

4) This person is going fishing on a Monday afternoon (for example) so they are probably off work on Mondays or afternoons.

Let's say, I also put in meetings. "Meet with Joe about building a website for his company."

1) This person builds websites

2) Uses hosting services

3) Buys domains

4) Probably codes

5) Must need project management software

6) And all other things typically related to people in this field...

Knowing someone's life this intimately is incredibly valuable.

Re: Google Calendar Is Down

#126

Post by suff »

Microsoft Outlook for Android shows zero appointments, at least once a week, and nobody posts about it. Shouldn't broken features make headlines regardless of whether the root cause occurs on the client or the server?

Re: Google Calendar Is Down

#127

Post by opencl »

ma2rten wrote: post #100
opencl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Google made any public statements about whether or not calendar data is used for ad targeting? Gmail was used for ad targeting until mid-2017[1] but I haven't seen anything about calendar. [1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

Afaik, it was never used for ad targeting so there was no announcement to make. Just think about it for minute. What percentage of people actively use Google Calendar? Out of those what percentage put useful information in there? How much commercial value does this information have?

I generally expect Google to be using all possible data sources they have access to for ad targeting without explicit statements otherwise like Gmail has received.

You work for Google and are apparently "pretty sure" that Calendar isn't used for ad targeting but don't actually know, how is a consumer supposed to know this stuff?

Re: Google Calendar Is Down

#130

Post by afandian »

nontekuser wrote: post #128

Non-technical user here: why does Google make me use Captcha if it doesn't work? Error 503, etc. afterwards.

Conjecture: Security is a probabilistic thing. They have threat levels which are derived from real-time data and the predictability of behaviour. So if an individual suddenly changes browser or IP they might trip. Or if an entire IP range does the same thing, that might be a hint at a hijack.

My guess is that something bad has happened centrally, which tripped the security heuristics as an unexpected event at a very high level. It then elevated the security for a very large number of users.

Post reply on HN