Google Analytics is coming back up, but the lives of a few people have been altered forever

"Who cares about Iraq, or the low spark of high-heeled Paris Hilton? Analytics are the major crisis facing America today." -Adlai Stevenson (deceased)

Just checked my Google Analytics again, and I appear to be getting data, most of which relates to my previous post about Google Analytics being down, and their belated announcement of that fact.

Which is kind of interesting, because most of the world is thinking about some other things that I talked about yesterday, such as the LifeLock CEO identity theft story, the appropriate sentence for Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton's disinheritance.

But by far the most popular blog post recently was the one about Google Analytics.

Or at least that's what Google Analytics says. (Hmmmmm...)

So if you don't know Google Analytics from Google Prosthetics, then I encourage you to skip this blog post and instead read this Michael Hanscom post about his experience as a photographer for Dance Off Seattle.

Meanwhile, we geeky people will talk about Google Analytics, which involves no dancing except on the part of PR people.

Other people are telling StartupSquad about a slow revival of Google Analytics' capabilities:

According to people who have been tracking and reporting on this outage, the service stopped delivering data since Saturday and today it is gradually limping back to normal.

Google itself (specifically Jeff Gillis) has posted an update:

We are starting to update reporting in all Google Analytics accounts affected by the delay. As of 5pm PST this evening, some users will start to see part or all of the data from the period between Saturday and now appear in reports. We expect updates for all accounts to continue through Monday night into tomorrow and will update this blog when reporting is fully restored.

Thank you for your patience.

Techwhack speculates on the cause of the Google Analytics problem:

Google Analytics users have been speculating that the problems are occurring due to recently introduced User Interface of the system.

Google had recently updated the backend to show reports in a more user friendly way. Looks like that upgrade has been kind of problematic for the service.

Ray Osherove is concerned about Google's response to the problem:

I certainly didn’t get any email telling me there are any problems. Bad, bad Google!

And Matt Huggins had to caution his readers:

For those readers attempting to follow the steps in the Beginner’s Guide to Interpreting Website Metrics with Google Analytics, please be aware that you will not be able to observe any statistics regarding your visitors until this is resolved.

But people have not considered the effect of this downtime on the mental health of Analytics users. I obsess about other things, such as traffic, but I think I can sympathize with Sierra Bailey's plight:

Okay, so I have a few OCD issues, I'll be the first to admit that...and I will definitely admit that one of my current big ones is to check google analytics all day long, every time I am bored, or have a few minutes to kill or come home or walk back in a room...you get the point, well from Sat pm until tonight, the site was broken and not showing stats. I have been going crazy! I know, I know, its sad, but I admitted it was a problem already! They have started to fix it...by morning I should be able to obsess in a normal fashion again...

So I encourage everyone to visit Sierra. In fact, visit her several times.

I'll be checking the traffic.

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