Would an internet service giant that dominates so many sectors be expected to have 100% uptime? You wouldn’t be judged harshly to expect Google to have 100% uptime and it appears that yes they do have outages.

Gmail and Google Drive is having outages with various effects from attachments not loading to be unable to upload and download from Drive. YouTube too saw issues which is not such a big deal.

Google is used by many companies and education to sync services like Email, Drive and calendars that’s where any potential downtime can begin to frustrate and become an effecting issue.

Google’s size and role in the internet makes having an outage seem very surprising and a reason that is beyond their backup solutions being able to mitigate it.

At this stage Google says: “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Google Drive, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.”

It’s hard to gauge how much downtime Google’s services suffer due to how their status dashboard is laid out. From clicking though it they have had several disruptions so far in 2019.

Google down = end of the world?

Had it been a social media platform suffering from downtime personally I wouldn’t be worried, upset or annoyed and I don’t see why most other people should not be upset at that. Google to have any type of downtime is a rarity and given the scaling done it most likely gets contained to certain regions.

That in itself minimizes the effect of downtime from services relied upon by businesses. It can happen to any company of any size and even Google itself isn’t outage proof however the size of the outage and outcome should be the measuring stick in did the company make a big mistake or not.

For some Google is a free product; Gmail for free, YouTube for free and some Drive space for free. Complaining about something being down that you don’t pay for is silly. Being upset about something being down that you pay for and need to make money is justified in a sense.

It still appears that in 2019 no one is safe from an outage, which when compared to a breach or loss of data is very much prefered.