JQuery 1.6.1 become unavailable on Google APIs today (01/25/2012)

Question

Does anybody have a scoop on JQuery 1.6.1 disappearing from Google APIs? Today, on 01/25/2012 at 8:30pm, suddenly parts of our app stopped functioning. Culprit is GoogleAPIs.com - something we relied on heavily for delivering JQuery APIs from their CDNs.

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.1/jquery.min.js - FILE NOT FOUND at 8:30pm CDT

https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.1/jquery.min.js - returns JQuery 1.6.1 API just fine!

This has made us rethink about relying on third party CDNs for delivering standard APIs. Our rational was that if user has visited other sites that also retrieved APIs from the google CDNs then, we can use the browser cached version of this API, thus reducing unnecessary traffic on internet and slightly improving performance.

By the way, all other versions seem to be accessible except 1.6.1 using http protocol! Anybody have any insights? Am I the only one observing this? I still have hard time believing that an API version can suddenly disappear like this from what is claimed to be a most reliable repository of all standard APIs!

Chances are that I had a cached version in my browser so I might not have noticed it until now (until cached version in my browser expired). Is it really a bad idea to offload scripts delivery to a third party?

Answer 1

It returns fine for me.

What you should do is try the Google CDN but have a local fallback.

This piece of code is succinct and achieves this...

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
    window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="/js/libraries/jquery.1.6.1.js"><\/script>');
</script>