Google Analytics in Data Blackout

Google Inc.'s Analytics service stopped delivering data to users on Saturday, another in a series of recent performance and availability problems affecting this popular Web site traffic-monitoring service.

The latest problem remains unsolved and is apparently affecting all Google Analytics accounts, according to a message posted Monday afternoon by a Google employee in the official Google Analytics blog.

Google didn't immediately respond to a request seeking comment about the extent of what it is calling a "temporary reporting delay."

Users can log in to their accounts, but the data hasn't been updated since Saturday night. Although the data hasn't been delivered, it hasn't been lost, according to the Google blog posting.

Organizations of all sizes use the free Google Analytics to monitor traffic and analyze usage of their Web sites. Using the data collected by Google Analytics, Web publishers make decisions regarding their sites' design, content and ad space.

Last week, Google Analytics suffered what the company called a "brief processing delay". Another such delay hit the service during the weekend of July 14 and 15, affecting "a small percentage of users," Google said then.

The previous weekend, a server outage prevented "many" users from creating and logging into new accounts, according to Google. A significant data outage left many users fuming in late May as well.

Google Analytics got a major upgrade in early May and some users are wondering if the performance problems are a result of the changes made to the service back then.

In a discussion forum about this latest problem, a user wrote that Google Analytics worked better prior to the upgrade.

"I was comparing the two interfaces while they were side-by-side and the old interface consistently reported more quickly," the user wrote.

Another user had a similar opinion. "I have had bad stats ever since they switched to this new so-called improved version of analytics. For me it has been much slower to show activity and has not reported all the data my AdWords shows. I wish they would have just left things as they were," this user wrote.