At around dinner time on the East Coast, my wife Kathleen called from Harrisburg, PA. She and her sister Mary planned a weekend away for the two of them and were looking for directions to a movie theater. I tried to pull up Google Maps and got a DNS error. Then I tried Google and got another DNS error.

I was in my living room using my laptop, a floor away from the WiFi access point, so I figured this was some sort of glitch related to latency on my WiFi network. After all, most sites I hit were responding. I used Mapquest instead, gave Kathleen the directions she wanted, and went back to watching the Prologue of the Giro d'Italia on OLN on my TiVo.

A little later I went back upstairs to the Home Office and learned that Google had been unavailable due to a DNS glitch of some sort. As Om Malik reported, many people initially thought that Google had been hacked.

I find the tone of Om's article kind of funny, but I guess Google's Internet properties are depended on by so many people on a 24-by-7 basis that even a momentary outage is like a major television network going black for the same period. Then again, the media has treated momentary outages at Amazon.com and Ebay like major news events for several years, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.