Google Down, What Now?
Last Friday 1/24/2014, Google services went down for a brief period of time. You’d be surprised by the outrage this caused for thousands of people around the world. While the service downtime only lasted 50 minutes, can you imagine what would be happening right now if services such as Gmail, Google+, and Google Docs were still down today?
Twitter blew up with #Googledown and Yahoo! even tweeted a picture of what Gmail’s temporary error page looked like. Interestingly enough, Google’s very own Site Reliability Engineering Team (SRE) was doing their annual AmA on Reddit. Jokes about “the guy” tripping over the cable that controlled all of the services were all over the thread. It’s funny how it turns out that they can use the same joke twice for two different threads that are a year apart.
On a more serious note, can you imagine what would happen if Google services went down for more than a day? Millions of people use YouTube, a Google owned company per day. Google has also recently connected YouTube comments with Google+ profiles. Since Google+ was down on Friday, no one could comment on YouTube.
What if Gmail stayed down for more than a day? Thousands of people that primarily use email to communicate with clients and prospective leads would have lost all of their information that was stored in Gmail.
This past Gmail downtime has taught me one thing. Back up your Gmail. Mozilla Thunderbird is a program that is easy to use and has the ability to backup your email locally so you can save them either on your computer or local server.
This whole catastrophe makes you wonder…is Google running the world?
