What The Google Outage Means
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The Google outage of last week will go down in history for several reasons. Besides the annoyance for people not being able to use their email it also demonstrated how quickly an Internet company can respond to an outage. I’m not talking about the software or hardware fix, I’m talking about how Google let us know there was a problem with 20 minutes of it happening. A fix was made within 1.5 hours. That was the good news.
The bad news is that the outage diminished the confidence many of us had in Google. The confidence of knowing that our email will work 24 x 7. The confidence we have it being able to use Google apps. in the cloud. One would believe that Google is keenly aware that if they expect us to use the cloud that we need a 100% reliable system. A system that is free from hacking and free from down time.
Some would argue that Google provides free services and this is to be expected. You know the old saying ‘what do you want for free?’ But with the Internet and other options available from Microsoft and Yahoo, why do many of us use Google? Should we expect more from Google than from other companies?
You decide and let us know your thoughts.
Comments welcome.
3 Comments
Martin Kruse
May 18th, 2009
at 5:20am
You act as if this is the first outage for any of those services… panic much?
mhz
May 18th, 2009
at 10:46am
Its the internet. Its a distributed network. It can’t be free from hacking and free from downtime. Nothing against Google. They may very well be best-of-breed, but the “cloud” cannot be guaranteed 24×7.
Anthony A
May 23rd, 2009
at 2:11pm
you call to get service on your account (any business) and what do you hear? “sorry sir, our systems are down at the moment, please try us again later”. Who hasn’t had that happen to them yet? So why should an 1.5 hour outage of google be any different? Systems go down all the time, welcome to the 21st Century! The alternative being, a pad and pencil! LOL