Google Gets its Own “Fail Whale”
The social-networking world and its monetized back-end social-media circles got their chance to prove themselves recently in their first collective trial-by-fire when Google’s entire fleet of services went down for several hours last Thursday. The search giant offered no explanation at first, causing wild rumors to spread throughout the various networks, and productivity slowed to a crawl for many users. Word immediately got out that Google had its own “Fail Whale,” as news of the failure hit real-time feeds like Twitter and Facebook like only an Internet-disaster could.
Popular aggregate sites like Digg and Reddit immediately showed the effects of Google’s absence, as the amount of content very quickly dropped to low levels during the outage. The sources of their submissions, the many blogs and content-rich sites that use Google’s services as a major backbone of their sourcing, were unable to produce anything without major delays. Services like GMail, Google Chat, Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google News, and even Google Search itself were nowhere to be found when major content producers across the United States and Europe showed up for work that morning. Much later, Google went public with an explanation that they had mistakenly rerouted some of their traffic through servers in Asia, which in turn caused 14% of users to experience an outage. Many believe these numbers to be deflated.
With Google’s massive framework knocked out, the social-networks kicked in. Once it was established that Google was not an option, the true efficiency of a network running on purely user-generated content became preeminent. There are also multiple social-networks, which while frequently are in direct competition with each other, also feed off one another, and in the case of third party applications work in tandem. With our current dependency on Google, the idea of suddenly losing its seemingly infinite resources can be a frightening one, but the real-time feeds of the social-networks provided an immediate fall-back option as well as the quickest dissemination of an “all clear” signal once Google began to come back online. This sort of activity is already well-known during crisis events like an earthquake, flood, hurricane or missing child, but nobody could anticipate the unofficial Core of the Internet suddenly shutting down without notice. Social-networking allowed the mainstay of daily Internet-based activity to continue moving, as opposed to the total halt that could have occurred during past times.
I remember when gtalk went down the other day I was like wtf?
haha yeah it was total chaos that morning