Gmail and YouTube Both Crash
We are a society that is so interconnected and dependent on the internet that it’s easy to imagine that our favorite services will always be there exactly when we need them. In fact, having anything else be true could be highly detrimental to a lot of businesses and individuals. It’s been common in apocalyptic fiction to question what would happen if electricity were suddenly gone, as it is no longer a luxury and society is built on it. But it’s quickly becoming clear that the internet is the same sort of service. We count on it in similar ways and many could barely function without it. That was tested recently as both YouTube and Gmail went down.
Email Issues
Gmail has come a long way from the days in which it was an invite-only service, and it’s now the most widely used email service in the world. While not all users saw it go down entirely, it was plagued by issues for about two hours. Error messages were popping up for some users. For others, the issue was latency, with emails taking a long time to go through — in what we have come to expect to be a nearly instantaneous process. For others, emails bounced back — saying that the address was not recognized, for example, when it was clearly the right address or even when the user had merely responded to a message that they got.
YouTube and Google Classroom
Both YouTube and Google Classroom also crashed. In the middle of a worldwide pandemic and with many students staying safe by taking online classes, it’s clear that this was a major issue. Fortunately, it was fixed after roughly an hour. But it was still a widespread issue that was noticed all over the world. And it also shows yet again how services we count on to be there 100% of the time can simply disappear without warning, and there’s really no telling — for the user, at least — when they’re going to come back up.
Interestingly, these are all services that are owned by Google. This could raise some questions about the idea of consolidating such widely used platforms under one name. Will that make it more likely that a lot of services could all go down at once, if the parent company has trouble, than if they were all owned separately? One major outage isn’t likely to spark any changes, but it will be worth watching to see if these types of complications start to happen more often.
A Changing World
After all, if anything, the world is growing more dependent on the internet. Entire businesses function online. Many office workers have shifted to working at home and may never go back to a traditional setting. We count on being able to communicate with people across the country or on the other side of the world in mere seconds. If that ability is taken away, even for a moment, it can make everything from business to school to personal life much more difficult.
At Content Customs, we understand how important online platforms and services are to you and your company. We live in an ever-changing world, and we can help you navigate it when things are running smoothly and when various issues crop up. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us today for all of your online needs, from social media to on-site content to SEO.
