Minor Google Meltdown Exposes The World's Utter Reliance on a Single Tech Company




Today's early hours saw the first reports of Google being down.

Even if it has now returned, it once more emphasizes how dependent we are on technological service providers and how many individuals are dependent on a single operator to do everyday tasks.

In the current world, there aren't many things we can entirely rely on, but for many people, Google is one of them.

Many others believed that its sudden removal from the internet was an almost catastrophic event, highlighting just how much "googling" has become a part of our daily lives.

It's unsettling when the websites we depend on suddenly become inaccessible, and much more so when it occurs on such a large scale, as I noted when the cloud computing company Fastly had an outage last year.

What took place?

We don't yet know. Google has not made any official comments on the outage to far.

There was a substantial increase in outage reports for Google earlier today, according to Downdetector. Reuters, a news agency, reported:

According to Downdetector, which analyzes outages by compiling status data from a variety of sources including user-submitted problems on its platform, there were more than 40,000 incidences of users reporting faults with the largest search engine in the world.

Google Maps access issues were also observed by Downdetector, while issues with Gmail and Google Images were also reported by The Guardian.

Numerous Google websites were damaged, according to the internet monitoring service ThousandEyes, which estimated that over a thousand servers were affected.

Despite the incident's size, it appears to have only lasted for 30 to 40 minutes until services resumed as usual.

Not a singular instance

Like many technological companies, Google is susceptible to a variety of potential service outages.

There have been previous Google outages in 2020, so this is not the first (including a very large one in December reportedly caused by lack of capacity in their authentication systems).

However, even these brief disruptions highlight how reliant we have grown on "googling" in many areas of our lives.

Not all the news is negative.

Even while every Google outage makes headlines throughout the globe, today's episode was, like all others before it, rather brief.

There is little doubt that Google has the ability and capacity to respond quickly to service issues when they do arise.

Additionally, as several users pointed out, you may still do online searches even if Google is unavailable; you may just need to switch to another search engine like Bing or DuckDuckGo.

It seems that even in the event of an absolutely unimaginable outage, our ability to look for cat pictures won't be affected.

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