What happens if Google goes down for a while? Is it really that bad? Yes, Gmail and Drive may cause all kinds of chaos but I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine and YouTube.
The data could be lost. Part of DiRT is ensuring that the result of losing N data centers is not "oops we lost 20% of GMail users data permanently".
On the scale of devastation this article is describing, none of Google's servicing being obliterated really matters but I'm personally pretty glad Google is prepared for multiple, massive scale disasters to happen at once.
The financial disaster would be horrendous. Look at the number of companies using google for email.
When the towers went down in 2001, the first business priority of many companies was getting email back online. It's an incredibly important part of a business.
Reminds me of when I was doing some consultancy for large oil/energy trading company in London. There was huge DR initiative going on at the time, and one thing they realized after surveying the business is that, if worst came to worst, they could still conduct business if they lost every other business system, as long as e-mail was available.
If Google App Engine goes down many sites will stop working. OAuth services will also start to fail. So will custom search provided to 3rd party sites (ok that may not sound too bad but you never now). Then there is cloud storage which in many cases is used as a backup mechanism. And how about the gazillion of sites that load js libraries from Google's CDN? Sure, a day or two is bearable, but make it a week and then the shit hits the fan.
The one thing you should bear in mind about earthquakes is that in many cases the aftershocks make more damage than the main one, because damage accumulates. Which means that critical infrastructure could take weeks to become fully operational.
>I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine
The search engine that holds the vast majority of the worlds traffic? The search engine that everyone is going to call on minutes after the earthquake to get news, but isn't going to be there so all the other search engines slow to a crawl. If Google search just disappeared for a week there would be a considerable number of businesses go out of business. You see it now in one off cases where a site is delisted and its traffic drops 99%.
That said, Google has datacenters around the nation and the world so that scenario is unlikely.
I wonder how it would play out if all the major search engines went down. I think people would start communicating on whatever sites they knew the URL for that were still up. Probably some ad-hoc manually curated indexes would pop up in comment threads on various sites and then a few people would probably aggregate these and host them on their local boxes.
> Yes, Gmail and Drive may cause all kinds of chaos but I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine and YouTube.
Perhaps you can, but how many companies are now wholly dependent on Google for their groupware functionality? What happens if you're one of the gaggle of people who make a living off YouTube?
In the grand scheme of things, not a lot of businesses use Apps for their email, but I'd hazard a guess that you're still looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in losses if that were to suddenly disappear.
It's the cascading service failures and related economic costs that would be the most damaging (and hardest to really quantify until a scenario really happens).
Wow, I had no idea that Google Apps were about 15% of Google's revenue. That is a way bigger than I would have guessed. (Hundreds of millions x 2 orders of magnitude is >= 10B, total revenue in 2014, 66B)
