Google outage could impact millions
Correction, 10:27 a.m. PDT: This story incorrectly described Google as a private company. It is public.
As far as I know, nothing tragic happened as a result of Thursday's but it does remind us how important Google has become to many people's lives and livelihoods.
In addition to search, millions of people rely on Google for their e-mail, calendar, and other Web-based applications including word processing and spreadsheet. With its Google Health service, the company has also branched into health care record keeping, making me worry that someday an outage could literally be life threatening.
There is also a financial impact. A lot of people and businesses depend on Google for all or part of their income. I don't know the exact size of the "Google economy" but if Google AdSense (Google's advertising program that serves ads on Web sites ranging from obscure bloggers to major media companies) were to go down, Web sites that display those ads would lose revenue as would businesses that depend on those ads to generate sales. Even search plays a critical role in plenty of people's financial well-being. Where a site comes up during a Google search for certain words can have an enormous impact on traffic and revenue.
Perhaps more so than the banks and auto companies that are getting government bailouts, Google has become "too big to fail." While it's not in jeopardy of any financial collapse, this latest outage reminds us that it's not invulnerable to being taken down by technical glitches or possibly even sabotage. The reason we worry about big companies like General Motors failing isn't just because of the impact on the company's stockholders, employees, or even customers, but on the thousands of businesses whose well being is tied to that of the giant automaker. If GM is a giant, Google is gargantuan, especially in terms of the number of people who make all or part of their living on activities that are dependent Google.
On its blog, Google said that the outage, which went on for about an hour, affected 14 percent of its users. That's millions of people. I'm not sure how much money was lost during this period, but I'm sure it was substantial. A longer lasting or more widespread outage, which is hardly out of the question, could have a severe economic impact.
I'm by no means suggesting that Google should be regulated by government, but I do think that it's gotten to the point where it has become a vital part of our infrastructure--as important as our airports, highways, and utilities. That's a mighty big responsibility for a single public company.
Larry Magid is a technology journalist and an Internet safety advocate. He's been writing and speaking about Internet safety since he wrote Internet safety guide "Child Safety on the Information Highway" in 1994. He is co-director of ConnectSafely.org, founder of SafeKids.com and SafeTeens.com, and a board member of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Larry's technology analysis and commentary can be heard on CBS News and CBS affiliates, and read on CBSNews.com. He also writes a personal-tech column for the San Jose Mercury News. You can e-mail Larry or follow him on Twitter @larrymagid. 
"vital part of our national infrastructure" -> "vital part of our global infrastructure"
"mighty big responsibility for a single private company" -> "mighty big responsibility for a single public company"
Google's issues yesterday was just a traffic jam. Congestion plagues each of the three example of regulated services you provided ("important as our airports, highways and utilities") constantly. And frequently do to much greater degrees than a one hour network failure. How many millions of person*hours are wasted by people sitting in traffic? What does this cost businesses?
If anything, I'd say the evidence suggests roads, airports, and utilities should be run with less government regulation.
Thanks for the interesting column. Just my $.02.
Microsoft bring in a LOT of business (read:money).
If Microsoft were to suddenly vanish, so will a large chunk of income from exported software (and partly hardware).
Other companies who depend on Windows will either fall, or switch over to Apple / Linux. (or fall while trying to switch over)
And Microsoft know this, since this is exactly what they have planned.
You tie enough people into your products to the point of near-absolute dependence, then you are doing a good ("evil") job.
Dude, your argument is fundamentally flawed. Your supposition that if MSFT vanished comps would have to "switch" is just plain bunk. How many businesses are running on Server 2000 and XP? Very old software that works just fine and comps have not been compelled to "switch" even with more recent offerings.
MSFT is not the same class, per se. MSFT's products are static, while GOOG's are dynamic.
Meaning if MSFT went out-of-biz, it's installed base would still be there and be 100% usable. If GOOG went out of business, there is no "recovery", there is no "unsupported" usage. Developers/biz around the world would be forced to spend time/money converting stuff to other systems - a MASSIVE and costly undertaking.
Yesterday's outage brought the message home to me: MSFT is an old economy manufacturing company (installed software) and GOOG is a "new economy" services company.
When GOOG went offline yesterday, stuff all over the web was broken. From Google Analytics on websites to email to AdSense/Words revs/adverts to even Twitter not working properly since it relies on Google APIs for its AJAX. Imagine using Google's API services (code.google.com) as the foundation to your online biz or service? Devastating.
If MSFT went out of business today:
Any XP lap/desktops would still work.
Any MS Office apps would still crunch numbers, present them nicely and enable folks to write about them.
Any IIS Server or MSSQL servers would still crunch data and connect folks.
Any Exchange driven setup would still exchange emails.
Any installed software would still work, albeit no longer "supported".
If GOOG went out of business today:
Millions w/ gmail services and emails (for Google Apps) would be out (hopefully they have backups via Google offline)
Millions of websites depending on AdSense and AdWords for revenue and advertising would be shucked - until they found and deployed replacements - a major economic setback.
Millions of websites with Mashups or Google services to provide info to users and staff would fail (Google Analytics, Google APIs, etc.).
When dynamic data/services go offline, they are effectively "gone".
BOTTOMLINE: If MSFT vanished, the next time I considered deploying any system wide change, I would have one fewer option to consider. If GOOG vanished, I would spend the next weeks/days/month dealing with broken websites/services, trying to find second source services and then developing/testing/deploying them.
I'll be sure to back up APIs and Google code in local repositories from now on.
Quite right, i was thinking more of the long-term impact than now when thinking of Microsoft.
Should have specified that..
Google invents their own OS, they own Electrical systems.. they try to boss around the world on everything from:
a) how to run the stock market
b) how to run a data center
c) how to build your webpages
but in reality, they're nothing but a one-trick pony that is doomed to fail.
This is just more a common sense thing than anything else.
These "web search optimization" pages are actually very good guidelines on how to build webpages.
Too many people waste so much time on useless markup and overcomplicate things for them, as well as page readers for visually impaired. (well, maybe some of the older ones, more recent ones are pretty good from what i have seen)
But i do agree with the incompetent part, to an extent.
The whole non-SSL thing a while back as an example of not doing it right. (not to mention a bunch of other silly decisions over the years that could have been handled a lot better, especially when it came to closing services down)
As for the heading before your list, if Google never made their own OS, or their own electrical systems, it would be nothing like it is just now.
These things give Google that extra juice which gives us search results in under half a second, and re-indexed pages on the minute-scale.
Besides isnt the possibilty of failure the whole reason why success is so fun?
And of course google can fail even if it is financially strong. So were many legitimate dot coms that many businesses depended on like Exodus but it didn't stop them from going down the drain. Ditto for auto companies at one point in history.
And we should remember that google wasn't always there and we were fine. Companies and people are resilient and greedy. If google disappeared, someone will find a way to make money on it.
What google should focus on is contingency sites and redundancy to alleviate outages.
I'm quite happy with Google, thank you.
Now shut up.
- by chetan_a May 15, 2009 10:48 PM PDT
- World did not end when meteor strike, Tsunami wiped out towns, CO2 emission gone beyond (thanks for policy makers!)
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(19 Comments)what damage Google outage (of couple of hours) can or will do?