Thursday, May 1, 2008
Google, Google, Everywhere, Not a Drop to Drink
So apparently someone at Google accidentally kicked a plug out yesterday. All day it was slow/intermittent.
At first I assumed that there was something wrong with my router. But when I got to work, the problem was still there, so I knew it couldn't be a local problem. I could get the internet to come up, but it took forever to load the home page. E-mail was slow, my feed reader was slow, my chat client kept disconnecting. I attempted blogging, but Blogger was on the fritz as well.
But our website was just fine.
I tried a couple of other sites: eBay, Amazon, CNN. They were fine as well. It was just Google, and it's associated by-products. This was slightly earth-shattering for me. Back when I was trouble-shooting modems in a call-center, I always told people to do a Google search to make sure their connection was working. Google is fast, easy to spell, and even if the homepage is cached, the search results wouldn't be. And if only one site on the internet was functioning, that one site would be Google.
And then yesterday happened, and there went that theory. Now maybe it's more complicated than that (both my home and work internet are provided by AT&T, for example), but the fact that only Google sites and apps were on the fritz is too much of a coincidence to overlook. And we use Google for a lot of stuff. We advertise through Google AdWords, Google Checkout is an option on our shopping cart, Google Talk often serves as an inter-office intercom system. I use Google for e-mail, RSS feeds, documents, advertising on my other blog (which is also a blogger blog, which is owned by Google), not to mention my home page and primary search engine.
Methinks, perhaps, I've put all my eggs in one basket, when it comes to web services.
At first I assumed that there was something wrong with my router. But when I got to work, the problem was still there, so I knew it couldn't be a local problem. I could get the internet to come up, but it took forever to load the home page. E-mail was slow, my feed reader was slow, my chat client kept disconnecting. I attempted blogging, but Blogger was on the fritz as well.
But our website was just fine.
I tried a couple of other sites: eBay, Amazon, CNN. They were fine as well. It was just Google, and it's associated by-products. This was slightly earth-shattering for me. Back when I was trouble-shooting modems in a call-center, I always told people to do a Google search to make sure their connection was working. Google is fast, easy to spell, and even if the homepage is cached, the search results wouldn't be. And if only one site on the internet was functioning, that one site would be Google.
And then yesterday happened, and there went that theory. Now maybe it's more complicated than that (both my home and work internet are provided by AT&T, for example), but the fact that only Google sites and apps were on the fritz is too much of a coincidence to overlook. And we use Google for a lot of stuff. We advertise through Google AdWords, Google Checkout is an option on our shopping cart, Google Talk often serves as an inter-office intercom system. I use Google for e-mail, RSS feeds, documents, advertising on my other blog (which is also a blogger blog, which is owned by Google), not to mention my home page and primary search engine.
Methinks, perhaps, I've put all my eggs in one basket, when it comes to web services.
Labels: technology
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]