What would happen if Google ceased to exist? Would the world end? Perhaps not, but the Internet would be impacted as was demonstrated by a dip in traffic on Saturday lunch time when Google fell over.
This wasn’t just Google search, which is probably what most people think of when referring to Google, it was every single Google service going including Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Talk, Drive, Documents, Sites, Groups and Google Maps, not to mention adverts. The whole shebang fell off the net as if it had never existed.
The outage was only for a few minutes, but in the five minutes that Google was offline global Internet traffic fell by 40%, followed by a huge spike as soon as they came back online. GoSquared Engineering have a graphic showing the outage in detail.
How much do you rely on Google? Could you survive if they had a prolonged outage? More to the point how would your customers survive. Would they even know that alternatives like Bing or Yahoo (powered by Bing) exist?
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Not just Google . . . Amazon.com, Microsoft and other big-names (see ‘PC Pro’ and elsewhere). Not at exactly the same time.
QUOTE: “The Amazon outage reportedly lasted for around half an hour. Amazon is remaining predictably coy about the cause of the outage, although Amazon Web Services users also reported problems, indicating it was a widespread problem with the company’s hosting infrastructure, rather than the retail site specifically.”
I’m sure we will never get to know the true reasons but seems strangely coincidental that a number of VERY large organisations are having “GLITCHES”.
It’s time for Google to go the way of Ma Bell. Their customer service is non-existent. Google continues to glitch on me for the past 48 hours taking YouTube – another site that has zero customer support – with it along with Twitter.
It needs competition, post haste, and it needs to be shattered into its components once again.