I suddenly noticed that Google is down for me as are a couple of other sites (yahoo for example ). I flushed dns, and did the usual cache clearing, still the same. Perhaps it's a node near me.
I don't think Google can go "down". In 5-6 years of using it religiously I've never even noticed it reacting slow, much less down.
Last time, G wasn't working well in my computer... it always requests me to enter the captcha whenever i am searching for some terms. all i did was to stop using the tools for automatic ranking queries.. now it works fine for me already..
It died here also, i was getting 50% packet loss and the packets getting through were +300ms My closest DC went down and i'd say the load balancer was having trouble routing queries.