As technology (in all its forms) becomes a bigger and bigger part of our everyday lives – did you ever stop and think about what would happen if it just “turned off?”
I’m not just talking about IOT (Internet of Things) devices – I’ve already covered that – I’m talking about the applications you use probably without thinking about them. Like YouTube. Like Snapchat. Like Vimeo. Like Shopify. Like Uber. Like Spectrum. Like Nest. Like Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs, Sheets, Drive, Voice, Analytics, etc.
We all “got to” experience a four and a half hour “glimpse of hell” this week when Google’s Cloud Computing infrastructure took a giant dump.
Everyday I use software applications and hardware devices that all work together to make my job (and thus, my life) easier. They simply “do their thing” in the background and I don’t consciously even think about them – or more importantly – what it takes in order for them to continue to do what they do.
It’s sort of like walking into a dark room and hitting the light switch. 99.99% of the time – when I flick the switch – the light comes on. It’s that 0.01% that’s the problem.
As long as it’s not a burned out bulb – there’s nothing that I can do about it. I’m at the mercy of a huge utility company who, while they acknowledge that there is an outage, have no idea how big the outage is, how long it will last, what areas will come back online first, etc.
800,000 Shopify Stores Went Dark All at Once
Shopify is an online host for selling stuff. You can sign up and start selling whatever it is you want to sell quickly and easily. There are currently over 800,000 online shops in over 170 countries… annnndddd they ALL WENT DOWN at once because Google’s “computing cloud” went down.
Nice.
There were other users who were complaining that their Nest thermostats stopped working so they couldn’t turn on their air conditioning, or use their Nest camera as baby monitors, or lock and unlock their Nest-powered front door locks.
And then, of course, there were the millions of people who use Gmail – they were all out of luck as well.
“It’s disrupting everything, including unfortunately the tooling we usually use to communicate across the company about outages.”
Google Employee in a HackerNews article
For the unlucky folks who use Gmail as their main business email (there are literally millions of users) – they had no way to communicate with customers to confirm receipt of their order, or to receive emails about mis-handled shipments, cancelled orders, etc.
In short – it was a cluster.
For millions of people.
Worldwide.
Now, I’m not advocating dropping all web-based services (the alternatives are to set up and run your own mail and applications server – something that is neither easy nor “fun”) – but, rather, to have a backup plan in case your email (or your ecommerce shop or Nest thermostat) goes “down.”
It’s like backing up your data “in case” your hard drive fails… it’s not a matter of IF but a matter of WHEN.
