Reports surfaced earlier this morning that Google was down.
Although it has since returned, it again underscores our dependence on technology service providers and shows how dependent many people are on a single operator for daily tasks.
There are few things that we fully rely on in our modern lives, but for many people, Google is one of them.
His brief disappearance from the internet felt like an almost apocalyptic moment for many – underscoring how deeply “Googling” has become integrated into our lives.
As I wrote when cloud computing company Fastly had an outage last year, “It’s troubling when the websites we rely on suddenly become inaccessible, and even more so when it’s happening on such a large scale “.
What happened?
We do not know yet. Google has not yet publicly commented on the outage.
According to Downdetector, there was a significant increase in outage reports for Google earlier today. The news service Portal reported:
“There have been more than 40,000 incidents from people reporting issues with the world’s largest search engine, according to Downdetector, which tracks failures by aggregating status reports from a range of sources, including user-submitted bugs, on its platform.”
Downdetector also reported that users were having trouble accessing it Google Mapswhile The Guardian also reported problems with Gmail and Google images.
The outage affected a variety of Google sites, with internet monitoring site ThousandEyes reporting over a thousand servers were affected.
Despite the scale of the incident, it appears to have only lasted around 30 to 40 minutes before services returned to normal.
Not an isolated case
Google, like all technology providers, is vulnerable to a variety of potential service outages.
This isn’t Google’s first outage – other outages have occurred throughout 2020 (including a very large one in December that was reportedly caused by a lack of capacity in their authentication systems).
But outages like this, brief as they are, underscore how dependent we have become on “Googling” for many aspects of life.
It’s not all bad news
Although any outage at Google becomes big news around the world, 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 have noted, even if Google is down, you can still search online — you might just have to use another search provider like Bing or DuckDuckGo.
It seems that even with an almost unthinkable outage, our ability to search for cat photos will not be affected.
Paul Haskell-Dowland, Professor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan University.
This article was originally published by The Conversation. Read the original article.