The Google dependency of the world

The world always assumes that Google services will be there from Gmail and YouTube to online storage search and smart homes. We take it for granted. Each hour, YouTube has 30,000 hours of videos uploaded.

Google has almost 230 million searches and an enormous amount of emails are sent in terms of connections. Google controls about a third of the surface internet, but on Monday, the 14th of December, 2020, all of Google services suddenly disappeared across the world. Users were unable to access emails, kicked out of ongoing Google meet sessions.

One Twitter user even said that he was left sitting in the dark with his toddler, as his Google home system had failed, the crash had become one of the biggest social media trends. It sent waves of panic across businesses, in many parts of the world.

How could one of the largest companies suddenly go dark on all of its services at once? What happened? Was this a hack in total? The outage only lasted one hour, but had already caused a lot of chaos. When it was all over, most people forgot about it and went about their day. But this event stuck with me . When you analyze the situation, some interesting things emerge, not only a consumer's dependent on Google, but many businesses that you may not think are also in the world too dependent on Google.

And how does Google avoid downtime in the first place? In this Vocal story, let's take a look.

The Google outage caused pandemonium across the world. Some of the biggest companies in the country use Google. And this includes Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, Instacart. The list goes on.

Uh, lots of companies use Gmail to quote unquote authenticates as you've tried to get into different websites and web services, Salesforce, Dropbox. So many others that use Google simply to get online.

There are companies literally in stand still as we speak, Oh, sick, wake up. Call. Not like we're depending on this, right? I mean, this cannot exactly. This cannot happen. This is it. Gmail, Google search, YouTube, Google docs, Google drive, the nest home systems, Google play, even stadia all gone.

The wall street journal newsroom was dependent on Google services. So during the outage, some reporters had to resort to using telephones to collaborate and writing stories. Some schools in the U S had to close for the day. Wayne Westland, community schools and Michigan gave its combined 10,000 students.

The day off after Google crashed the school, relied on Google meet for classes. Many other educational institutions would have been affected due to the prevalence of online classes because of the ongoing pandemic. There were also cases of the management of medical companies, not being able to check on the schedules of physicians and other medical staff, nor being able to contact customers remote work and learning have left individuals and businesses more dependent on online services than ever.

And in this domain. Google is the most widely used all in all the outage affected billions of people worldwide. So what happened? Google spokeswoman told the wall street journal that there was a problem with the company system that authenticates login credentials. She stated that the problem was due to internal servers and that the issues weren't the result of a cyber attack.

This explanation doesn't give us much, but that's just about all that Google wants to say about the issue. As you'll see later in the episode, just maybe there was something more to this outage than first meets the eye. It really is rare for Google to have such a global outage like this because even a single physical geography is served by multiple servers across the world.

And even on these servers, there's multiple backups that rapidly come online. If there's a problem. So as we've seen so much commerce and people's livelihoods rely on Google, it raises some serious questions. What if next time Google was down, not just for an hour, but for days, billions of dollars in revenue could be lost by companies around the world.

So how does Google prevent this? How does Google basically never go down?

Google’s plan is to keep their services up and running site reliability, engineering, or ARE coined all the way back in 2006, SRE is a digital design philosophy. Basically for Google. The idea is to get software coders, to run software management, instead of getting it managers to run it, people call this kind of philosophy dev ops.

Basically development software coding that provides the outcomes of a system administrator for thinking goes as follows. Software coders will get bored by performing tasks by hand and naturally build tools to help automate the process without the involvement of actual people. In fact, Google has written a book about this, which I'll link below.

Google states that SRE is its most fundamental feature. Todd Underwood of Google in 2016 told a wide magazine quote, we long for the day when nobody runs it. It's interesting because traditionally the development and operations were opposing forces. The devs always wanted to build new software and get the changes out to the public as fast as possible.

But the operation staff wanted to ensure that nothing went wrong and the best way to do this is to keep the changes to a minimum. The trick that Google found is that if you combine development and operations, you can get a powerful synergy for a reliable system. It makes sense. Google is the world's largest online empire.

So the more humans you have running things, the more probability there is for mistakes. So just have code, run everything, but within that human coders can still make mistakes.

And another question must be asked is the Google empire too big? Some say that Google's outage temporarily crippling, the productivity of billions around the world and has just made the biggest antitrust argument anyone could have ever done. Currently. Google is facing off against the U S department of justice for violating antitrust laws.

So, according to the U S government, the answer to the question of Google being too big is yes. It's the biggest antitrust case against a tech company in at least a generation here, nothing is off the table in here, which could include a breakup of Google. The following information is from today's sponsor morning brew.

Google's lawsuit is one of the biggest antitrust cases since Microsoft in 1998, while monopolies aren't technically illegal, shutting out the competition is. The department of justice argues that Google illegally ensures that if search Jen is the default option preloaded into cell phones from Apple's iPhone to its own Android phone, and this blocks out competitors.

This lawsuit will take more than a year to go to trial. And it's one of many antitrust lawsuits against the company. You can read stories like this or anything on business, finance or technology at morning brew morning brew makes the latest news fun and easy. You can get up to date with all the latest breaking news and just five minutes all in one place without having to trundle through different news sources.

It's delivered to your email inbox each week, day, and Saturday, click the link below to subscribe to morning brew today. It takes just 15 seconds to sign up and it's free. So where we all have Google services going down all across the world for about an hour. The results were pandemonium across businesses and individuals alike.

And then we learned how Google keeps things running, which site reliability engineering. So moving on. What about hacking? So to combat the threat of hacking Google often runs hacking championships. These feature hackers who report security problems so that they can be fixed before bad actors exploit them.

Google calls this the vulnerability reward program. And it was first launched in 2010. According to Google in 2019, the top prize in this category was around $1 million for hacking a Google pixel phone though. This next part is the interesting thing. The Google outage occurred just a mere few hours after it was discovered that the US government had been targeted by foreign cyber attack.

The hack was so serious that it led to an emergency national security council meeting at the white house. Experts are calling it one of the most sophisticated hacks ever seen. It was done through something called a supply chain hack, a software tool called solar winds that was used by government departments was infected with malware during an update.

After this, the hackers were able to monitor and turn off emails and do some general snooping. The infected software update in question was released all the way back in March of 2020 and lay undetected until last week, thousands of companies and American government departments use some form of solar wind software, some affected by the hack include the department of Homeland security department of justice, department of defense, the treasury department, NASA, the NSA, and more.

All of the top 10 us telecom companies and 425 of the U S fortune 500 companies are all said to be at risk. It's estimated that 18,000 clients had installed the infected update. Ironically, for the topic of this video, solar wind software monitors, computer networks of businesses and governments for outages, government officials admit they were stunned by the sophistication of the hack and that many of America's most deeply held secrets.

May have been stolen. They were able to access different levels of credentials. In other words, they got in through the back door. Then they were able to get into the front door of all of our homes and all of our buildings and all of our government agencies. As I was producing this video, though, some more breaking news, uh, Microsoft security analysts believes that there was a second group that launched a second attack on the same solo in software.

It's an evolving story and we have to wait and see what happens here. So this is speculation on my part, but what if this massive Google outage was a response to the solar winds attack? Google staff may have been hardly shoring up the security and the scrambling resulted in some downtime across all of their services for a massive worldwide outage to occur justifi hours after a massive cyber attack on some of America's greatest companies is pretty interesting timing to put it mildly.

So linking back to the main topic of this episode, Google's outage can be seen as a stark reminder of our hyper connectedness. The company has become a bottleneck for so much of the world processes. It's become part of a massive system. And if it breaks that also has massive consequences for just one company to become an unexpected choke point for global productivity is pretty unnerving.

This whole conversation isn't even to mention privacy issues or the shady origins of Google, or having a digital profile sold for ad revenue. So what can be done? Well, the solution is obvious there's alternatives to Google. For every service they provide. It really comes down to the individual person or business.

What it all comes down to is trading in some of that convenience that we've all gotten used to. So what do you guys think? Do you think that the world is too dependent on Google? Were you affected by the Google outage? And if so, what were you thinking at the time?

So I'm wishing that you enjoy your holidays and I'll see you in the next Vocal story. If you want to follow me, you can check me out on Twitter.

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