How dependent are we on Google?
Google’s apps crash in a worldwide outage
As the world moves to work from home due to the massive pandemic spread across the globe. On the day of December 14, 2020 Google applications suddenly went dark. Services including Google Search, Drive, Gmail, Meet, Home and various other platforms offered by the tech giant went offline. The outage lasted for about an hour, but the duration was enough for everybody to realise that how dependent are we on the tech giant. Its effect seen throughout the globe and majority of humans connected to the internet were affected. It was reported by various news publications that due to failure of the Authentication System used by these apps, the platforms went offline.
The Google outage follows a significant failure at Amazon in late November. There, the company’s Virginia data centre failed for almost 90 minutes, taking down not only Amazon itself for most American users, but also many other services and websites that rely on AWS, the company’s cloud computing arm. Companies including the photo-sharing site Flickr, the Podcasting service Anchor, the streaming service Roku, and the logistics business Shipt were affected by that outage. So too were a number of Smart Home services, including Roomba, which left some unable to even vacuum their homes while they waited for their work to come back online.
The history of internet infrastructure
Due to the single point failure in the ecosystem, the whole system went dark. Product outages were once fairly common in the early 20s’ for the growing internet companies as new ideas were coming into light and internet had started to reach the common households across the countries in the European and American subcontinent. The concept of data centers were not common. The companies used to buy their own network equipments and server products to establish in-house servers infrastructure to host their web applications for the people to access them using the web.
Coming back to the recent time, organisations such as Google and Facebook have been building complex networks of interconnected data centers around the world as the concept of cloud computing has become fairly common to people. Incidents have become less common and Google has been privately financing undersea cables to move the data between continents and improve performance in the event problems occur in a certain location.
The reliability of the systems have become increasingly important as people and businesses depend on the services, whether to search for information online, find directions, send email or get access to private documents stored on Google’s servers.
Effects due to cascade of the recent events
“If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist.”
People have become more and more reliable on services provided by the big tech companies. Every major player in the industry serves millions of users across their platforms. We outsource our resilience to the cloud services and third party providers. But resilient as they are, nobody is totally immune. There can be a single point of failure that affects millions of people.
Tens of thousands of businesses rely on Google’s network of tools for email, internal communications and video calls. YouTube has more than two billion active users. People have started to adopt the idea of smart homes and billions of active devices are being used across households. Google is one of the major player in the smart home IoT industry and due to the recent event, people were affected majorly. Devices from thermostat to the smart bulbs are being controlled through the Google Home network. People were left in the dark unable to turn on their lights as the outage continued. Room temperature went down during the harsh winters as the Nest thermostats stopped working as the Google servers went offline. Children attending classes through Google Hangouts and Meets were given a holiday by a number of schools due to the outage. Just imagine what would have happened with people who store all their data on the Google Drive. A number of third party services like Slack, rely on Google’s authentication service (Sign in with Google) as these services were affected.
What can we learn from this?
Outage highlighted the fragility of the world’s digital networks. The incident is likely to provide fodder for those who say the biggest technology companies have grown too powerful and deserve more oversight. In the United States, Google and Facebook are facing antitrust lawsuits. In the European Union, new regulations will be introduced to limit the industry’s power.
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