Gomez, Inc. (www.gomez.com), of web application experience management , reports that Google's technical issues this morning caused dramatic performance issues for many web businesses. Gomez, which tests tens of thousands of web sites 24/7/365 using the industry's largest global performance monitoring network, found that immediately after Google's problems started, web sites on average took twice as long to load and were twice as likely to fail. In the online retail segment, Gomez even measured a 4x slowdown in web transaction speeds.

Google Analytics and other Google services are extensively used by web sites around the world. When Google experienced its issues, any web site using its services felt the impact. The ripple effect was magnified when web sites automatically tried to re-establish connections with Google's services, causing further network congestion.

"The impact of Google's problems demonstrates the complexity of today's web sites and their susceptibility to performance issues when third party content or service providers experience problems," said Imad Mouline, Gomez's CTO. "Many web properties were probably unaware of today's situation, because traditional monitoring solutions would not detect the issue or isolate the root cause. But every Gomez customer who was affected was immediately alerted. Any organization that depends on their web presence needs a system that can pinpoint, diagnose and resolve web performance problems across the entire web 2.0 application delivery chain. The only way to do this is by testing and monitoring from the outside-in."