I work as a contractor for the Coast Guard, and this happened to me at work a few months ago. The way they set up the network is such that they only have a handful (like 3 or 4) of gateways for the entire 40-50 thousand users. When this occurred, it actually happened across the entire Coast Guard network such that no one was able to use Google.
Fortunately, working for the Federal Government has the perk that when someone with enough stripes on their shoulder called them up, Google explained that they have certain algorithms that monitor accesses to their resources from specific IPs and if they exceed a certain threshold, they block them temporarily because it’s likely to be a denial of service or some other form of malicious attack. Of course, being part of the federal Government, they were able to get the thresholds modified so it wouldn’t happen again.
If you work for a large company and this affects your work, it may behoove you to contact your IT department and have them work with Google, but I’m unsure what their response would be to a private enterprise. If you’re at home, you’re probably SOL, because it means your ISP is probably doing something screwy or you actually have some malicious software on your system.
It’s been a long time since I read the book, so I’m taking a bit of a guess here, but is the answer that I’m a cynical and affectless cop so worn down by the cold artificiality of my world and so removed from anything real or genuine in my life that I am less capable of experiencing human emotion than the simulated people I’ve been hired to hunt down? Cause if so, that’s a sweet allusion you made!
This happens sometimes in the UAE and Qatar as we have to go through a proxy (our internet here is censored). Not sure if it is still the case, but to the outside world all of Qatar used to appear as a single IP.
I’ve had it pop up when there were too many computers/programs connected to Gmail via a single IP address. Google sees a large number of requests from programs, including their handy desktop notifier, checking for new mail on a single IP and thinks it is being attacked.
Damn, it’s not from the book. It’s from the movie. Oh well, at least I got the reference. Would a machine get that reference? I don’t think so! Ergo, I must be human. Right? RIGHT?
About a week ago, I got nothing BUT that exact same error for two full days! It never mattered what I entered, every single thing I searched for got that error.
Have you ever tried to email Google? I spent hours trying to find an email address for them that might have garnered me a reply from a human being (who’s the robot here?). In the end I felt I had no choice but to telephone one of their offices in California.
They left me on hold and never picked up. Fuckers.
Naturally, before going that route I assumed the fault had to be at my end, so I scanned the shit out of my computers with a half-dozen highly respected anti-virus and anti-malware tools. Nobody found nothin’.
It simply had to have been their error, the proof of which came home when – after two days of nothing but that error – Google suddenly started working fine again.
I’ve always despised Google, and this certainly hasn’t improved their standing in my eyes!
Dammit, it’s happening again. For at least the last 24 hours, I’m seeing the exact same thing!
I sent Google another email complaint yesterday, but, as in the first instance, I’ve never receieved any response from a human being. They just keep replying with a robotic email of their own with the exact same message as I get every single time I do ANY Google search!