Has Google ever been down?

Well, I don't think so, it is usually very happy.

Oh, you meant "down" as in "down." Nope.

I can't say I've ever seen it down, I figure if they're doing maintenance they do it on a few servers at a time and you'd be connecting to a different server.

I don't know if that's actually how it works, but that's just my thoughts on how it would work.

http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/google.com.html

I assume there are countless servers, so even when several of them are in maintenance... there's a shitload more that keep the job done.

2 days ago google was down for a few mins

Every now and then you do see their services go down for a little bit. Not intentionally though and not for maintenance; that they can do on portions of the network at a time.

I don't believe it's ever been down world wide. However it does occasionally go down 15 minutes up to 4 hours somewhere around the world. I remember a recent one where it was down for about 45 minutes on .com/.ca/.uk/.mx which google said wasn't their fault... :)

yes.

Google goes down for a few minutes, web traffic drops 40 percent

17 August 2013

Actually yes. Google had a major bug in the log in form (an accident by one of the main coders). It allowed everyone to log in to an email with any password. The reason was that one of the main coders put a "return true" in the wrong place. That was the first time in a very long time when google was down. After they realized the leak, they literally rip the cables off the walls, since the main coder flew into an another state. A great Youtuber called "Computerphile" made a video about this event explaining it throughly. I can't get you the video since I'm on mobile, but I'm sure you'll be able to find it. :)

Last year once for few minutes i remmeber it being down i even took a pic but its gone with my old hdd.

I've read on Cracked.com that some years ago, Google was "down" when one of their staff added a backslash instead of a full URL to the list that checks for potentially harmful sites and blocks them.

As a result of this, ALL the existing websites were flagged as harmful and blocked, including Google's own page :D
It didn't last very long, but I can imagine it caused quite some chaos :D

probably been down, cause it the internet

xkcd