Google has at least partially crashed the website unwomen.org today by placing a link to it on the front page of Google.com. The search giant is commemorating the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on its homepage, as well as on the new tab page in the Google Chrome web browser. But the page in receipt of all the clicks is struggling to stay online.
Unlike with its other efforts that send web searchers to timely content relating to holidays or various special occasions, Google did not create a customized Google logo doodle for the day in question. Instead, an image of a white ribbon appears beneath the search box on Google.com, and, for Google Chrome users, it appears below both the Google search box and the website thumbnails of your most recently visited pages on Chrome.
The unwomen.org page is not entirely down, however. In some cases, the site loads almost normally. Other times, it loads very slowly. And in other cases still, we were met with “Service Unavailable (HTTP Error 503) webpages.
Currently, the website DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com reports that unwomen.org site is up, but for a large part of the morning so far, anyone clicking on the link from Google.com was met with such slow page load times that end result is essentially the same as if the site was down entirely. That is, after several minutes of waiting, the site would usually load – but by then, most of the curious passers-by would have given up and clicked away.
That's a shame because the article being linked to is a worthwhile awareness-raising effort on the part of Google and UN Women, the United Nations entity focused on gender equality and empowerment for women.
The UN observes the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November 25th, a date that marks the assassination in 1960 of the three Mirabal sisters, who were political activists in the Dominican Republic, or so the articles explains if you are able to get it to load. Today kicks off sixteen further days of activism against Gender Violence, which will this year also include an “Orange the World in 16 Days” theme. This encourages participants to wear the color orange, which is the official color of the UNiTE to End Violence against Women campaign.
We reached out to the UN Women organization via email and left messages, but have not yet heard back on how the group may be working to resolve the situation internally with its web server response times. In the meantime, the UN Women Twitter account remains a decent alternative in terms of staying informed about the ongoing campaigns and other efforts.
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