Google suffered a brief outage during the second week of August 2022. Although it recovered relatively quickly in this instance, it left many analysts thinking about the potential implications of such a prominent digital player suffering downtime.
The impact was that millions of Internet users were left unable to access the most used search engine in the world – usually its most resilient product in the face of technical difficulties – as well as services such as Gmail and YouTube.
Some people also reported having problems accessing Google websites, while others said they were having trouble logging in to other Google services, such as Google maps and Google images.
According to the network intelligence company ThousandEyes Inc., Google outages were affecting at least 1,338 servers globally across more than 40 countries including the United States, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Israel, parts of South America, Europe and Asia including China and Japan.
Pitching in on the matter for Digital Journal is Jon Lucas, Co-Director of Hyve Managed Hosting. Lucas focuses on why the Google wobble has left many in the technology world feeling uneasy.
Lucas notes: “As one of the largest IT providers in the world it inevitably comes as a shock when Google’s services aren’t available. Users have come to expect high availability from brands such as Google, but outages can happen, and when they do the focus shifts onto how long it takes for services to come back online.”
He adds: “In this case, Google responded well, and minimum disruption was caused, which no doubt left consumers and businesses that rely on their services such as Gmail, Maps and YouTube breathing a sigh of relief.”
Yet the situation can still create a feeling of uncertainty in the stomach of the average technology provider.
Lucas opines: “However, for businesses that rely on cloud solutions from large providers such as Google, this could come as a warning that even the biggest names can be impacted by downtime and highlights why your business shouldn’t become totally reliant on a single public cloud provider.”
