Hey Google, You Good?

By Michael Mandia ('24)

Google malfunctioned on Monday, December 14, after being struck with a widespread outage. There are nearly 4.39 billion internet users, and the number of international Google users is close to 4 billion, which demonstrates our reliance on the product. 

Google's underlying evaluation accuses a glitch in the identity management for the complications, which is how the Google Servers locate your demand and access their applications. “The root cause was an issue in our automated quota management system which reduced capacity for Google’s central identity management system, causing it to return errors globally,” reported by the company on its support page, “As a result, we couldn’t verify that user requests were authenticated and served errors to our users.” 

Twitter and other social media platforms were accessed almost instantly after people from all over were experiencing problems resulting in the hashtag "#YouTubeDown" to trend. Thankfully, the servers were dark for approximately 50 minutes, and now all administrations are green, demonstrating that they are completely operational. 

The reliability of the systems has become increasingly important due to COVID, as individuals and businesses depend on the internet for school, work, etc. Many customers detailed some of their household machines not working because they were connected to Google’s of home products. During lockdowns, schools have relied on Google services to educate students forced to remain home. “At least the outage resulted in not being able to do our homework,” stated Chris Calvario, a senior from Albertus Magnus High School.

I interviewed John Argenio from Albertus on how he was affected by the Google outage. He declared, “I was left in the dark-literally. I had no clue what was going on and if anyone else had the same problem. At first, I thought I was the only one, and it turned out to be just the opposite.” Michael Guenther ('24) from NR exclaimed, “There was no insight on what was happening. All I knew was that I’m being left out of my classes because nothing was working!”

Student-teacher communication is already different, to begin with considering our circumstances. For example, before COVID, we could go directly to our teachers and receive an instant answer to our questions. Now, we must send an email and wait for a response or stay after school on the Google Meet. Chris, John, and Michael all experienced technical difficulties throughout the day. With so many more users on devices for online learning, struggles and delays can become a daily occurrence for everyone.