The Top 10
Google's signon servers went down earlier today for about an hour, meaning that you could not access its cloud-based software through your account: Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google News, Google Translate, Google Ads, Google Domain, Google Cloud Platform Dashboard, Google My Business, and more. Services that don't need an account, like YouTube, Maps, and Search, still worked, if you signed out. Offline software, like Picasa, kept right on working, naturally.
The outage occurred during the night for my timezone, so I never noticed until reading the excited tech media upon waking. I captured some of the best reactions from the twitteratti. As Richard Fernandez reminds us from time to time, Western civilization has become fragile, because it has tossed out too many of the redundancies that would otherwise make us resilient.
As The Register's Tim Anderson put it, "When authentication breaks, everything breaks," and commenter RGP added, "Complexity <> resilience."
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Joe Brown / @joemfbrown: I'm sitting here in the dark in my toddler's room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking... a lot right now.
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Jason Jacobs / @jjacobs22: Google outages are the new Snow Day.
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@killedbygoogle: And ya'll want a Google Autonomous car, huh? smgdmfh.
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Harpreet Singh / @harry_jerry: 2020 is so bad it took Google down.
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@iancutress: Annual reminder, while Google is down, that the cloud is just someone else's computer. Always have a backup.
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Ryan Perry / @rynprry: Time to get some Google Candles.
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Dan Gainor / @dangainor: I hear light switches are all the rage.
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Kip Williams / @kiptw: And just think about how Google must feel, not being able to know what room you're in right now, or what you are listening to, or what you are watching.
Plus a few political tweets:
Mark Di Stefano / @markdistef: Google's entire suite of products crashing, bringing people to a grinding halt, less than 24 hours before Europe reveals its sweeping new anti-monopoly guidelines. You hate to see it.
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Dan Primack / @danprimack: Well, that's one way for YouTube to prevent election disinformation.
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