Massive Google outages this morning have users asking what’s going on in this enormous digital empire, spanning not only dominant web search engine activity, but email, videoconferencing, and even free streaming media.
Since Google serves billions of users in many different ways, even a one-hour outage really gets noticed.
Reuters reports at least 12,000 YouTube users in the U.S., Britain and India experienced problems with viewing content, adding this:
“Outages on select Google apps are not uncommon, but Monday’s outage affected all its popular services, including Google Hangouts, Google Chats and Google Meet, products that people have used extensively during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Jon Porter at The Verge puts that number closer to 100,000, and adds reports of problems with smart home services like Nest Hub.
“Despite the outage affecting numerous Google services, its core search product continued to function, and third-party ads were still showing in results,” Porter writes. “The outage was worldwide. We verified that services experienced issues in the US, UK, Netherlands, and Japan, and DownDetector’s outage reports spanned the globe.”
In addition, all of the many schools relying on Google Meets have had to put out warning messages to students and parents and other stakeholders using the videoconferencing platform.
Google has responded via its Workspace Status Dashboard, but hasn’t given clear information about why the outage occurred.
“This page offers performance information for the following Google services,” Google spokespersons write. “Unless otherwise noted, this status information applies to consumer services as well as services for organizations using Google Workspace.”
Ok, thanks – but why were the services down? Server upgrades? Somebody hit a wrong button?
It’s a telling example of 21st century interconnectedness – if one hour of Google outage creates this level of confusion, think about what a full day would look like.
In the meantime, factor this sort of “too big to fail” status into your portfolio if you’re looking at investing in technology stocks in general. Google continues to anticipate further antitrust action in the United States and elsewhere, and pushback from retailers claiming that it misuses its search power and advertising authority, but the monumental power of Google and its subsidiary Alphabet isn’t going away anytime soon.
