Yesterday I created a google analytics profile for one of my sites and included the JS block in the layout template. What happened next was very strange. Within about 2 minutes, the site had become unreachable.

I had been checking the AWStats page for the site when I thought to set up GA. After that had been done, I clicked on the link for 404 stats, which opens in a new tab. It churned for a long while and then showed a nearly blank page, similar to that when Firefox chokes on a badly-formatted XML page, except there was no error msg. But i was logged into the server and could see that that page has a 401 Transitional DTD. Strange!

I tried viewing source but it just churned endlessly. I then tried "inspect element" and was able to see an error msg having to do with some internal Firefox lib. Unfortunately, i neglected to copy that. :-(

All further attempts to load anything on the site would time out. Firebug's Net panel showed no request being made. Chrome would time out.

So, I deleted the GA profile, removed the JS block, and cleared the server cache. No joy.

I then removed all google cookies and disabled JS. Still nothing. No luck in any other browser. And now my client couldn't access the site. Terrific.

I was able use wget while logged into another server. The retrieved page was fine, and did not contain the GA JS block. However, the two servers are on the same network. (Perhaps a clue.)

The server itself was fine. Ping, traceroute looked great. I could SSH in. I tailed the access log and tried a browser request. Nothing. But i forgot to quit and a minute or so later I saw a request from someone else being logged. Later, I could see that requests had been served all day to some people.

Now, 24 hours later, the site works once again, but is still unreachable by the client (who is in another city).

So, does anyone have some insight into what's going on? Does this have something to do with google's CDN? I don't know very much about how GA works but what I'm seeing reminds me of DNS propagation issues. And why the initial XML error? And why the heck was the site just plain unreachable? What did google do to my site?!

Sorry for the length but I wanted to cover everything.