Google Downtime

I use Google about every five minutes at work between Google Analytics for our sites, Google Base for products from one of our sites, searching for various things, and of course Gmail. Did I mention I also use Google Chrome as a browser? Well I do, it's made me a little lazy in typing in URLs since the address bar also serves as a search function so technically I don't have to remember them all.

That said, it took me no time at all to discover that Google went down today. I went to sign a client up for Google Analytics and the form would not load to save its life. Not that a web form has a life, but you know what I mean. At first I thought it was the internet, but I checked several other heavily frequented sites with no problems. That's when I realized: Google was down.

Naturally I opened up the long abandoned (for me) Yahoo website and searched "google down" for anything of interest as well as checked CNN.com out of sheer curiosity (not at all expecting to find anything). I found absolutely nothing useful anywhere about the current outage but found a few articles that amused me, mainly because I hadn't noticed outages in the past. Once was titled "If Google Went Down, What Would You Do?"; this one made me laugh a little as I realized my internal answer was shock as the possibility hadn't occurred to me before. (It reminded me of my days on campus when the internet would go down campus wide and we'd be forced to wander outside our rooms and discover the real world as homework became impossible.) I also came across Google's website that displays whether or not their apps are down: Google Apps Status; but lets be real, that only works when all of Google isn't down.

Around 40 minutes later, after my boss was relieved to find he wasn't the only one that noticed this rare anomaly, Google returned and all was well. It's funny what we become so dependent on.