Google Takes Sabbatical. World Freaks Out.
The Internet — By corey on May 15, 2009 10:35 am
While there are certain demographics that I expect to be reading this article, I can’t say with any confidence just who you are as a person. Yet even with that being said, I can put good money on you having tried to Google something yesterday morning. That says a lot about the popularity of Google; an Internet super power that has become a household name in homes that don’t even have Internet. So what happens when something that commonplace suddenly falls on its face and goes down for a few hours? Boy howdy!
Yesterday morning, people around the globe watched as Google’s online services stopped responding. One after the other, the company’s online applications became nonresponsive. People flocked to Twitter to express their dismay and conjure what happened to Google in 140 characters or less. I’d quote you some of their tweets, but nobody cares about Joe Schmoes trying to be clever for cleverness sake. The important bit to take away from it is that *the majority of the Internet community collectively crapped its pants yesterday morning.*
I can’t say I blame them, either. Google’s whole platform is that you can transfer your personal and business computing needs to an online presence that doesn’t require expensive software to be installed. They can do this because they’re frickin’ huge. So when the frickin’ huge company suffers a great big failure for several hours in the morning, things are going to get hairy. Never mind the college students typing away on Google Talk, or the random search request asking how many meters are in a furlong (it’s 201.168). The people who really hurt from these outages are the tech-savvy folk who place their faith in a single, online application to create and store their business presentations, facts and figures, and so on. Just try and imagine how many career-making meetings were ruined yesterday morning when the up-and-comer realized he couldn’t open up the project he had saved in Google Docs. Yikes.
Of course, the appropriate adage here is the one about not putting eggs into a single basket. Still, its moments like yesterday where you can come to realize just how scary reliant you are on things. Take heed, gentle reader, so that the next time Google goes down you can still function as a competent, able member of society. If not, then there’s always Twitter.
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