Google had many services unreachable yesterday
I use Google services pretty much non-stop. From my Nest thermostat to Google Maps, Photos, Gmail (private and work,) and Assistant. There’s also the nonstop camera upload from my Nest devices, my kids using YouTube Kids, so unless something’s off there’s never a minute throughout the day that I’m not somehow using Google services.
Yesterday there was a major slowdown and partial outage for nearly four hours and it somehow skipped me completely. So yay me.
The issue is listed as network congestion in the eastern US, but it’s probably going to end up being a fiber cut, switch meltdown, network route misconfiguration, or some guy in Kentucky spilling beer on the servers.
Those with a VPN implemented with their routers could change VPN locations to the west coast and move right along, but there was not a lot of notice of what to do from Google during the Googlegeddon.
At 4 hours of down time for the goog’s internet service on the east coast, that’s putting them for the year at (breaks out maths) 153 days x 24 hours = 3,672 hours, 4 hours downtime, they’ve been down 0.00108 of the year or an uptime of 99.99892%. Assuming they don’t have more outages this year they can reach 99.999543379% uptime.
In the meantime the people complaining that walking to the thermostat to change it was barbaric on Twitter was hilarious. The inability to open Nest locks remotely or see cameras however do highlight a very valid concern that you can’t trust any one thing 100% of the time.
I wonder how many AirBnB guests were locked out, and whether anyone was burgled without evidence due to the outage.
[FastCompany]
