Google was down in several parts of Europe + Turkey for over 3 hours today – and the chaos and shock on social (and even at the office) was pretty notable.
Some open Slack threads lasted for hours, with people trying different things – from US proxies to VPNs to tethering from mobile, using mobile cell networks, foreign telecoms, eSIMs.
(I almost resorted to my Google Fi card or connecting my Samsung telephone to the Dex station, turning it into a fully fledged computer, since apps were largely unaffected).
It may seem minor at first, but not nearly as much if you’re as tightly connected to the ecosystem as some of us are.
- Gmail intercepts all work and personal email, including HubSpot forms, applicants, leadflow, Asana notifications, and many many more. Yes, most can be accessed separately, but opening and refreshing 15 apps vs. one inbox is so counterproductive.
- Google Docs – tons of scorecards, proposal templates, KPIs, workflows, templates, cheatsheets and so on are there.
- Google Calendar – try to sort out what happens next and whether you have a meeting coming up.
- Google BigQuery (and the GCP infrastructure) – this was operational in the process, but the inability to access data, dashboards, and filter down ETLs was scary.
- Google Analytics/GTM – were sites intercepting traffic accurately?
- Google’s OpenID Connect – some sites were largely unable to connect if you log in with Google (which many of us do)
Other services were impacted, and Google Search was a key one.
Depsite all the LLM usage, virtually everyone found themselves trying to open URLs they didn’t fully know by name, or looking up a brand to “search” the brand’s website, and other use cases.
Even substitutes here included Bing, Yahoo (me), DuckDuckGo as alternative. I curiously asked why LLMs were missing, even though I was myself using Perplexity just 40min before the outage.
Consumer behavior is a weird beast – one you can investigate in practice only under force-majeure circumstances.
