In May 2009, Google services experienced an outage that affected users from all over the world. Later Google confirmed the three and a half hour outage.
Then again in August 2013, Google, along with all the related services was inaccessible for users for 2-3 minutes, and it caused the entire internet traffic to drop by a staggering 40%. If that happened for 2-3 minutes and caused such a dent in the web traffic curve, imagine what would happen if it lasted a half an hour.
The thought of Google to go down for 30 minutes is a pretty big deal. Google does not only serve as a search engine; it encompasses Gmail, Youtube, Blogspot, AdSense, Reader, Google services like Android, etc., to name only a few. Here are some likely scenarios that may happen in such a case.
After multiple reloading attempts and multiple calls to service providers, people will come to Facebook and see that there is an epidemic of “OMG Can’t believe” posts, #GoogleShutDown & #GoogleGone hashtags and screenshots of the global phenomenon while realizing that it is not just happening to them.
They might look for other options; my question is how? Don’t we use Google for that look up? That’s what brings us to the happiness of Yahoo and Bing. The traffic surge on these search engines will be huge. Other alternative search engines that can be used are Lycos, Daum, Excite, Dogpile, Baidu.
DuckDuckGo will be the trending on Twitter and masses will open their hearts to this good search engine. The apps that use Google for their back-end processes will stop functioning as well, not to mention the revenue losses for companies using Google, other than Google itself. The freelancers, programmers, developers and people who have their livelihood dependent on the search engines will not have access to 600 billion pages in data centers of Google.
The productivity around the world will plunge for 30 minutes time, without Gmail. Can you imagine how many people will be lost and stranded in weird places given their lack of access to Google Maps? Many more will be lost in translation without Google Translate for 30 minutes. People will suspect the involvement of hackers and think of what it could mean for them if Google doesn’t work for unforeseeable future.
Among all this chaos, life will continue without any difference in CHINA.
Once the services have been restored, there will be an official statement by Google that will state the causes of the outage. Experts will debate, and media frenzy would be the next trend. The hackers-involvement discussion will become official. Buzzfeed and ScoopWhoop will publish articles with titles “Google went down for 30 minutes, You won’t believe what happened next.” and “10 best things to do during Google Outage.”, which will lead people to this article.