Comments on: Google outage could impact millions

Google's recent outage reminds us how central that company is to the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Is that too much power in the hands of one company?

[DoesWhat]

"not sure how much money was last" -> "not sure how much money was lost"
"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"

[jps0611]

Sorry, I don't understand your point.

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.

[rslc]

Microsoft?

[Hunnter2k3]

They also fall under this category. (IMO)
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.

[oh4real]

@ Hunnter2k3

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.

[Hunnter2k3]

@oh4real

Quite right, i was thinking more of the long-term impact than now when thinking of Microsoft.
Should have specified that..

[sanjayb]

You forgot one thing. The MS activation servers. If MS went down how will all those installations of XP, Vista, etc, etc validate themselves? Remember us users are guilty until proven innocent. We can't validate we are all guilty. :-P

[russkeller]

It's really too bad the world governments have had thier anti-trust regulation in the Attic the last 30 years for all industries.

[Aaron Kempf]

google is incompetent. they don't need to re-invent the wheel. they try to fight in _EVERY_ segment. History says that Napoleon tried to do the same thing-- and he got slaughtered in Russia and wasn't able to win a single battle after 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.

[Lumiseon]

One trick my ass. EMail, Search, all that crap. That does not make a "one-trick" pony. Your argument is flawed, try again.

[Hunnter2k3]

>how to build your webpages

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.

[ericyen]

Is Google a National Asset at this point?

[notyourpalshane]

I concur wholeheartedly that significant outages would have a major effect on our day to day routines. However, this whole "too big to fail" thing has gotten out of hand. The demise and ruin of a company no matter how big is simply an example of the risk taken by today's society. Depending on anything too much is plain stupidity. Anyways...

Besides isnt the possibilty of failure the whole reason why success is so fun?

[myles taylor]

So how could this be made better? You said you weren't saying that Google should be regulated and that's good; because I hardly see how that would help. The government just f***s things up anyway. So what should be done? Google is what it is and it works so well because of how it is run and what it does. Leave it alone and let it do what it does. Nothing is immune to outages so there is no way to make it impervious to that. 14% is miniscule. They have enough redundancies that it's rare that it even happens. Stop whining unless you have solutions.

[gerrrg]

The outage wasn't that bad. The market would punish Google if this were a continual problem and shift away from Google products, forcing Google to markedly improve reliability by extraordinary costs to get to that last 0.02% of uptime reliability.

[renGek]

I think its a pointless argument. Govt regulation is pointless because something like our electricity grid is too big to fail but the govt can't prevent outages or near catastrophic outages like the NorthEast a few years ago. So why would I believe they can do anything beneficial in terms of google where I am sure govt employed workers would have very little understand of.

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.

[gggg sssss]

this is the fraud perpetuated by the cloud advocates. If you cant find free pron for an hour, not that big a deal. But rely on google, amazon, salesforce, netledger, twitter and their ilk to run a business, health care, government, and you are a stupid fool and deserve to join GM. Too many people are believing their own press.

[loose_screw]

If it wasn't Google, it would be Yahoo. Same spiel/complaints, different company.

I'm quite happy with Google, thank you.

Now shut up.

[chetan_a]

World did not end when meteor strike, Tsunami wiped out towns, CO2 emission gone beyond (thanks for policy makers!)

what damage Google outage (of couple of hours) can or will do?