Some people went into a state of shock today as many of Google’s services including Gmail, Drive and just about everything else went down. All of this happened early in the afternoon today and as of 9 PM PST there doesn’t appear to be any official word on exactly what happened earlier today. Google did however post information stating the they were aware of the issue and working quickly to get it resolved.
Google has gone down in the past but this was a pretty good punch. Social media sites like Twitter were blowing up with tweets about the outage and it felt kind of like the internet had disappeared.
It’s a strange feeling when things “mess up” on the internet that aren’t supposed to. Not to long ago Godaddy.com went down and so did many of the websites that depend on Godaddy to operate. Server errors were handed out to millions upon millions of users and it seemed that for a short moment the world had suddenly come to an abrupt stop.
Our dependency on the internet is substantial and when it’s not functioning, neither are we. It’s kind of a scary thought and it’s a thought I have discussed before, we really need to continue to improve the reliability of the internet and continue to improve web-security. Even though Google was able to quickly resolve most issues, it still shows a giant vulnerability in our system.
When a team of divers enter underwater caves, often referred to as “blue holes”, they tie a rope to rocks as they go deeper into the cave. This rope leads back to the entrance of the underwater cave and acts as a life line for these underwater explorers. Our modern world relies so heavily on the internet and our safety line is getting thinner and thinner as many of us move away form doing things offline. Many companies, including banks and utilities have encouraged us to go to paperless statements only to find that when their site goes down, your essentially helpless. If the service goes down for hours or in some cases days, it can be difficult to get through busy phone lines to make sure issues get resolved.
Now imagine loosing it all and things begin to get very serious. I laugh as I begin to recall a particular South Park episode in which the internet goes down. Google seems to be back on it’s feet and as soon as we see an official explanation we will let you know.
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