Minor Google Meltdown Exposes The World’s Utter Reliance on a Single Tech Firm

Earlier at the moment, stories started rising Google was down. 

Whereas it has since returned, it as soon as once more highlights our dependence on expertise service suppliers and exhibits how reliant many individuals are on a single operator for every day features.

There are few issues we fully depend upon in our fashionable lives, however for many individuals, Google is one.

Its temporary disappearance from the web felt, for a lot of, like an almost-apocalyptic second – underscoring how deeply ‘googling’ has been built-in into our lives.

As I wrote when the cloud computing agency Fastly had an outage final 12 months, “It is disconcerting when the websites we depend on all of a sudden turn out to be inaccessible, and much more so when it occurs on such an enormous scale”.

What occurred?

We do not know but. Google has thus far not commented publicly on the outage.

In accordance with Downdetector there was a major spike in outage stories for Google earlier at the moment. The information wire Reuters reported:

“There have been greater than 40,000 incidents of individuals reporting points with the world’s largest search engine, in response to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating standing stories from a lot of sources together with user-submitted errors on its platform”.

Downdetector additionally reported individuals had skilled issues accessing Google Maps, whereas The Guardian reported issues with Gmail and Google photos, too.

The outage affected a variety of Google websites, with web monitoring web site ThousandEyes reporting over a thousand servers being impacted.

Regardless of the size of the incident, it appears to have solely lasted for round 30-40 minutes earlier than companies began to return to regular.

Not an remoted incidence

Google, like all expertise suppliers, is susceptible to a variety of potential service failures.

This isn’t the primary Google outage – different outages occurred in 2020 (together with a really massive one in December reportedly attributable to lack of capability of their authentication methods).

However outages corresponding to these, nonetheless temporary, do underscore how dependent now we have turn out to be on “googling” for a lot of facets of life.

It isn’t all dangerous information

Though any outage at Google turns into main information around the globe, at the moment’s incident was short-lived – as have been all earlier circumstances.

Google actually has the capability and functionality to behave swiftly to resolve service issues once they do happen.

And, as many individuals famous, you possibly can nonetheless search on-line even when Google is down – you would possibly simply have to make use of a special search supplier, corresponding to Bing or DuckDuckGo.

It might appear that even when an nearly unthinkable outage happens, our capability to seek for cat pictures is not going to be impacted.

Paul Haskell-Dowland, Professor of Cyber Safety Observe, Edith Cowan University. 

This text was initially printed by The Dialog. Learn the original article.