It wasn’t even 3 months ago when i made this post on Googles downtime. I explained that whilst it is a huge bummer, Google still isn’t immune to downtime and so many services rely on Google cloud to function.
Its happened again
Being half way through 2019 and Google has had 2 ‘bad’ lots of downtime. Another cloud incident has brought issues to Google cloud, Snapchat, Gmail, Discord, YouTube and more.
Oddly enough even Shopify had issues which of course wouldn’t happen if you easily hosted your own e-commerce store/solution.
The actual Google cloud outage itself would not worry most but then as many would come to find out it takes down services that rely on it such as Snapchat and Discord.
I wonder how other cloud giants like AWS or Azure feel, relieved or happy? Happy that it gives positive perception of their services or relieved that its not them and they’re under no pressure.
Cloud oligopoly
Google having downtime clearly isn’t impossible and in an amusing like way, when all these services go down with Google we all feel the effects of the cloud oligopoly. There are only a small amount of large scale players but plenty of mid sized providers which understandably don’t have the infrastructure for these big services.
Like all past Google Cloud incidents the downtime of YouTube, Snapchat, Discord and the like are not a serious annoyance. You should be able to live without these services for a few hours but Gmail and calendars or any medical service being effected is a problem.
It is only on Twitter that you find complaining about the downtime, If you read the HN thread or various generic Reddit threads there is no carrying on that “Google sucks”.
Google could have 99% uptime for the week and that 1% of downtime would be noticeable for someone, somewhere. Unless of course by miracle it was at 3am for a select timezone.
Perhaps on the flip side no one ever create an article saying Google does a good job of running x amount of services with a massive amount of load on a global scale. Do we take things for granted?