On Wednesday, reports began to surface that Google was down.
Google down for thousands of users – Downdetector https://t.co/jQYLzHdjNC pic.twitter.com/TIbcYrtImU
— Reuters (@Reuters) August 9, 2022
Although it has since returned, it once again highlights our reliance on technology service providers and shows how dependent many people are on a single operator for everyday functions.
There are few things that we fully rely on in our modern lives, but for many people, Google is one.
The brief disappearance of the internet felt like an almost apocalyptic moment to many – underlining how deeply “Googling” is integrated into our lives.
How’s google going?! This is it, this is the apocalypse pic.twitter.com/CtaGXY1709
— ✨Deedee LaCraze✨ (@deedeelacraze) August 9, 2022
like me wrote when cloud computing company Fastly went out of business last year,
It’s troubling when the sites we rely on suddenly become inaccessible, and even more so when it happens on such a massive scale.
What happened?
We do not know yet. Google has so far not publicly responded to the outage.
According to Down detector there was a significant spike in outage reports for Google earlier today. The news wire Reuters reported:
There were more than 40,000 incidents of people reporting problems with the world’s largest search engine, according to Downdetector, which detects outages by collecting status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.
Downward Detector
Downdetector also reported that people had problems with access Google Mapswhile The Guardian reported also problems with Gmail and Google images.
The outage affected a wide range of Google sites, including an internet monitoring website ThousandEyes report that more than a thousand servers are affected.
Despite the magnitude of the incident, it appears to have only taken about 30-40 minutes for service to return to normal.
Not an isolated event
Google, like all technology providers, is vulnerable to a wide range of potential service outages.
This isn’t the first Google outage – otherwise malfunctions took place in 2020 (including a very large in December allegedly caused by a lack of capacity in their authentication systems).
But such outages, however brief, do underline how dependent we have become on ‘googling’ for many aspects of life.
It’s not all bad news
While any outage at Google becomes big news worldwide, today’s incident was short-lived, like all previous cases.
Google certainly has the capacity and ability to act quickly to resolve service issues when they arise.
And, as many people pointed out, you can still search online even if Google isn’t available – you may just need to use a different search engine, such as Bing or DuckDuckGo.
It seems that even when an almost unimaginable glitch occurs, our ability to search for cat photos is unaffected.
- Paul Haskell-Dowlandprofessor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan University
This article was republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.