Google Crash: What does it mean for us?
By: Meet Singh
Tags: Crash, Google, Business, Economy, Hacking

The world always assumes that Google services will be there, from Gmail to Youtube to Online storage, search, and Smart homes. We take it for granted each hour Youtube has 30,000 hours of video uploaded, Google has almost 230 million searches and an enormous amount of emails are sent, in terms of connections Google controls about the third of the surface internet but on Monday the 14th of December 2020, all of Googles’s services suddenly disappeared. Across the world, the users were unable to access emails, kicked out of ongoing Google Meet sessions, one Twitter user even said that he was left sitting in the dark with his toddler as his Google Home system had failed. The crash had become one of the biggest social media trends. It sent waves of panic across businesses in many parts of the world. How could one of the largest companies suddenly go dark on all of its services at once? What happened? Was this a hack?

In total, the outage only lasted one hour but had already caused a lot of chaos! When it was all over, most people forgot about it and went about their day. But this event stuck with me. When you analyze the situation some interesting things emerge: Not only are consumers dependent on Google but many businesses that you may not think are also. Is the world too dependent on Google? And how does Google avoid downtime in the first place? In this article, let’s take a look!

Our Google Dependency

The Google outage caused pandemonium across the world. Some of the biggest companies in the country use Google and this includes Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Netflix, Spotify, Twitter the list goes on.

Employees not able to reach not just these services in terms of Gmail but in some cases get into the system at all. Lots of companies use Gmail to authenticate as you try to get into different websites and web services, Salesforce, Dropbox so many others that use Google simply to get online. In certain cases that's inaccessible too. It's also hitting the real world’s nest heaters that control the heat, air conditioning, and the like, those appeared to be down as well. Across the globe, there were companies literally at standstill. It was a wake-up call of how dependent we are on Google, and we all realized that this could not happen, this is it!

Google Services

Gmail, Google Search, Youtube, Google Docs, Google Drives, Nest Home Systems, Google Play, even Stadia all gone! The Wallstreet Journal newsroom was dependent on Google services. So during the outage, some reporters had to resort to using telephones to collaborate in writing stories. Some schools in the U.S. had to close for the day. Wayne Westland Community Schools in Michigan gave its combined 10,000 students the day off after Google crashed. The school relied on Google Meet for classes. Many other educational institutions would have been affected due to the prevalence of online classes because of the ongoing pandemic. There were also cases of the management of medical companies not being able to check on the schedules of physicians and other medical staff nor being able to contact customers.

Remote work and learning have left individuals and businesses more dependent on online services than ever and in this domain, Google is the most widely used. All in all the outage affected billions of people worldwide.

So what happened?

A Google spokeswoman told the world street journal that there was a problem with the company’s system that authenticates login credentials. She stated that the problem was due to internal servers and that the issues weren't the result of a cyber attack! This explanation doesn't give us much but that’s just about all that Google wants to say about the issue. But maybe there is something more to this outage than what first meets the eye.

Google Data Centers

It really is rare for Google to have such a global outage like this because even a single physical geography is served by multiple servers across the world and even on these servers there are multiple backups that rapidly come online of there is a problem. So as we have seen, so much commerce and people’s livelihood rely on Google. It raises some serious questions, what if next time Google was down not just for an hour but for days? Billions of dollars in revenues could be lost by companies around the world! So how does Google prevent this? How does Google basically never go down?

How Google stays running?