Online Outages, Outrage and Ordeals
Sunday, May 24, 2009
By the standards of most power outages, Google’s little hiccup last Thursday was nothing special. Most users of Google’s sites and services didn’t even notice, and those who did regained access in a couple of hours.
But to people who rely on Google for their e-mail, their calendars and their documents, seeing them suddenly drop offline must have felt as if somebody had carved a chunk out of the Internet.
An outage with a Web-based service can be the most maddening kind of computer malfunction. You can’t walk over to the responsible computer, swear at it, and then reboot it. You can’t even tell where the offending machine exists. All you can do is take the site owners at their word when they say “we’re working to address these issues” — if they acknowledge the problem at all… read more
