At 7:48am Pacific time on May 14th, I was sound asleep in my corner of the world. Good thing, because if I had been working at that time, I would’ve been among the unlucky ones who, for at least an hour, experienced an Internet without Google. The thing is, today, the search giant is no longer just that. We depend on it so much now on virtually all aspects of our online activities, so a widespread outage involving most of its services is a little unnerving. A post from Geeky Guide said it best:

I have a lot of my life invested in Google’s portion of the “cloud”, I have to admit. I route all my email through Gmail and I collate all my RSS feeds via Google Reader. I schedule events and reminders on Google Calendar and I maintain a decent number of friends on Google Talk. This blog is on the Blogger platform, my domain is supported by Google Apps and my RSS feed is run by FeedBurner (now a Google product). I run AdSense programs, AdWords advertising campaigns and I study all this through Google Analytics. I manage two wikis via Google Sites, I get updated via Google News and I even have a few Google Alerts set to notify of key updates. I maintain a number of documents and spreadsheets on Google Docs, manage a few email lists via Google Groups and I still have some leftover stuff on Google Notebook. Don’t forget watching videos on YouTube and even maintaining links on Google Bookmarks! The list goes on and on… So yeah, a Google outage is a near catastrophe for me. I’m like Google’s primary demographic and it just kills me when any of these services go down, what more all of them.

He’s not alone. Most of us probably use a few of the services mentioned on a regular basis. The outage didn’t last that long, but it’s enough for Google to seriously reexamine its whole architecture to prevent a recurrence on a grand scale. CNET said they got reports of the incident coming in from California to New York, and from as far as the United Kingdom to Malaysia. Urs Hoelzle, Google’s SVP for Operations, wrote the following explanation of what happened on the Google Blog:

Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and “always on,” so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.

There’s no perfect network and downtimes seem to be a part of life, but when an error (reportedly from GMail) can snowball into a virtual system-wide failure, things have got to change. Trust is a tricky thing, so I hope Google makes good on their promise.