A big outage at Google Tuesday

A big outage at Google Tuesday. Things go dark early while most of the U.S. is sleeping. Still, the Internet is without borders and so the glitch leaves millions of people who use Google Web mail and Google Apps, high and dry.

It was mild melodrama for a few hours but things returned to normal after a few hours. It's still unclear what happened, though Google says it's investigating the problem.

Truth be told, the walls of Jericho did not crumble, though the outage nonetheless triggered the (now thoroughly predictable) hand-wringing and bloviating from the usual cast of characters. Amusing to watch, but after this incident, there's also the wider context to consider.

Any outages are embarrassing. But while Gmail did crash a few times in 2008, this is the first time the service has gone down in quite a while. (As my colleague Stephen Shankland noted, Google extends a guarantee to corporate customers paying for any of its business Apps services, which rely on the cloud. The promise: they will be able to access Gmail at least 99.9 percent of the time every month. If not, Google pays them a penalty fee. So far Google says it hasn't fallen below that mark.)

If these sorts of outages occurred with more regularity, I suppose that would seriously retard cloud computing's growth. Google and Salesforce.com and Amazon and any other purveyors of cloud-based services obviously cringe when their connections fail. Not to underplay the anguish customers and vendors find themselves dealing with, but the real news here is how rare these cloud-computing outages have become.

A few years ago it seemed that eBay's Web site was seizing up all of the time. The reality was less severe but merchants and bidders would scream bloody murder. At the same time, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and Buy.com were dealing with repeated denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Things got so bad that some even feared for the future of e-commerce.

We now know how the story turned out. Fact is that there are no 100 percent guarantees anymore, not in a world in which applications increasingly get hosted on the Internet. When things go bump in the night, as they inevitably will, there is going to be a commotion, albeit a temporary one. Get over it, already.

This is computing, after all.

Indian outsourcers, Microsoft top the list of H-1B users in '08

Microsoft Corp. was the top U.S.-based recipient of H-1B visas in 2008, receiving approval for 1,037 visas, slightly more than in 2007. But the largest users of the program remain the major Indian offshore IT services firms -- and their use of H-1Bs appears to be increasing, according to government data.

(See a searchable listing of the companies receiving H-1B visas in 2008.)

The importance of the H-1B visa program to India-based outsourcers is clear from the fiscal 2008 approval list compiled by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS). That fiscal year ended Sept. 30.

The H-1B visa program has been one of the most controversial issues in the IT industry. High-tech firms argue that the visas are needed so they can recruit talented graduates from U.S. universities. But opponents say the program is being used to push down wages and enable the offshoring of IT jobs.

The program is currently capped at 65,000 annually, with another 20,000 set aside for advanced-degree graduates of U.S. universities.

In the latest listing of visa holders, Infosys Technologies Ltd. remained the top user, receiving approval for 4,559 -- the same number it got in fiscal 2007. Otherwise, the numbers for other major users varied, with some of the offshore firms showing sizable increases in their use of the program.

In second place after Infosys was Wipro Ltd., which received approval for 2,678 H-1B visas in 2008. The year before, Wipro got 2,567.

Even though Satyam Computer Services Ltd. revealed late last year that it had substantially misreported its financial statements, leading to a scandal that has put its future at risk, it received approval for 1,917 H-1B visas. That's far in excess of the 1,396 it got in fiscal year 2007.

Fourth on the list was Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., which used 1,539 visas last year, almost double the 797 it got in 2007. Microsoft was fifth on the list, winning approval for 1,018 visas, 59 more than it got in 2007. Among other U.S. firms, Google Inc., which publicly complained in a blog post last year about the H-1B system, received 248 visas -- far less than it wanted. And Lehman Brothers Inc., which failed late last year, received 130 visas.

There has been a recent backlash in Congress over the use of the visas. The $787 billion federal stimulus bill it approved earlier this month imposed restrictions on H-1B use by financial services firms that receive bailout funds.

Federal enforcement of visa laws related to the use of H-1Bs may be growing as well. Earlier this month, federal agents said they had arrested 11 people in six states in a crackdown on H-1B visa fraud; unsealed documents showed how the visa process was used to undercut the salaries of U.S. workers.

At one point, Microsoft's H-1B hiring drew the attention of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who last month wrote to the company and urged it to give U.S. workers priority over H-1B visa holders in its plan to layoff 5,000 employees.

The USCIS distributes H-1B visas via a lottery system because applications have been exceeding the visa cap routinely in recent years.

The USCIS will begin taking applications for the next fiscal year on April 1 and will distribute the new visas on Oct. 1, at the start of the 2010 fiscal year.