On Monday, December 14, 2020, people had trouble accessing their Gmail accounts. Gmail, Google’s free and very popular email service started from the position of zero in 2004 to number one today, serving 1.5 billion users. Also affected in the December outage were Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Drive (online storage). Even YouTube, the number one viewed site on Earth, was down. The outage lasted 47 minutes, according to Google, but must have seemed like forever to its users, who turned to Google to ask, “Is Google down?” Thank God, Google search still worked. The outage affected only Google services that rely on user authentication. The next day, a smaller outage affected only about 30,0000 people. The problems started around 4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and were over by 7 p.m. according to Google.
The outages were cause by server issues, said Google spokespeople. Before too long, Google had traced the fault to the user authentication system. The User ID service was being migrated to a new quota system, according to a detailed fault report on Google’s site, but parts of the old quota system incorrectly reported zero usage and did not allow access to about a dozen Google services. It’s complicated. See the whole explanation here. Don’t worry, the company assured, there was no hacking, no cyberattack.
Outages among the big tech services are not uncommon and are almost always quickly fixed. But in a world that increasingly relies on them, is there ever a good time to have one? Especially now. Don’t they know there’s a pandemic going on? If we can’t connect online, we can’t connect.
Google won’t say how many servers it has around the world in data centers, but Gartner estimates the company had 2.5 million servers 5 years ago. Your emails and files are distributed and duplicated in data centers far away from each other. If a server goes down, or—perish the thought—an entire data center goes down, the system automatically and seamlessly switches to another resource, server or data center, according to Google.
Google is not alone in claiming a near infallibility of a distributed, redundant and secure (its words) cloud services and storage. Microsoft Azure claims a 99.995 percent average uptime across its global cloud infrastructure. Amazon Web Services, the pioneer and first in cloud services, had an hour-long shutdown in November 2020 that shut down Roku, the number one video streaming device and number one in serving up Netflix. Now, this is getting serious. A nation without its “bread and circuses” is what causes unrest. That’s from Juvenal, a poet in ancient Rome. Or was it Monty Python?
But is there a guarantee that there will not be longer outages, or something worse? Hacks and decryption on a large scale are always a possibility. What guarantee do we have that these unregulated, giant for-profit tech companies will continue to act in good faith, given scant government or public oversight, or that they will stay in business, or not be commandeered by rogue governments, domestic or foreign? A coordinated terrorist attack against softly protected data centers may not just be the next Die Hard movie.
To say that the outages of online services, brief as they were, rocked the world would be an overstatement, and nightmare scenarios of terrorist attacks and toppling governments are admittedly farfetched, but are we too reliant for our information, our communication, our shopping, our deliveries … and soon our medications (Amazon is getting into prescription fulfillment), as well as our daily lives, professional and personal, to be entrusted to a handful of tech giants?
Google Outage—the New Snow Day
The publishing world depends on Google. This article was nervously researched with at least 25 Google searches. In addition to having emails for our work domain, we also have Gmail accounts for our personal accounts. But this dependance pales in comparison to Google’s penetration into modern curricula. With Chromebooks widely distributed and docs, course material, and so on—all freely offered by Google, schools without access to Google services must shut down. During December’s outages, the Wayne-Westland Community Schools in Westland, Mich., with 9,800 students, closed its doors. “This is the new snow day,” said Jenny Johnson, spokesperson for the school district in a Wall Street Journal article.
Don’t Be Evil No More?
Google’s unofficial but well-known motto was “Don’t be evil.” That was when the company wanted to be seen as the benign, friendly giant that only helped, never hurt, and was in the business of giving everything away for free. Most of Googles products continue to be available free of charge. Who could quarrel with a company that was trying so hard to not make a profit? Beyond free email and docs, Google toyed with the idea of bringing free Internet to whole communities, blanketing cities, even whole countries, with Wi-Fi. The company was so good to its employees, paying them enormously while giving them one day a week for any cause they held dear. The company’s fleet of shiny white buses that provided (free) shuttle service between San Francisco and the company’s Mountain View headquarters purportedly had the Wi-Fi password “dontbeevil.”
That motto “Don’t be evil” was quietly dropped from Google’s published code of conduct in May 2018 and started fading from the company’s website and corporate culture. Since then, the benevolent giant has been cast in a harsher light. Googlers accused of sexual harassment were given million-dollar exit packages. The creator of Android software was given a $90 million dollar exit package—$2 million a month for 4 years—even as Google believed the harassment accusations were credible, according to the New York Times. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, apologized repeatedly for the company dealing (or not dealing) with the sexual harassment problem, saying that the company had fired 48 employees for this reason, all of them without exit packages. It wasn’t enough. 1,500 Googlers, mostly women, protested at the company headquarters with a walkout that was repeated at other locations.
While generating as the top place to work for techies, even glorified by Hollywood (The Internship, not recommended), its hiring methods, where applicants run a gauntlet of “challenging questions” and are asked to solve coding problems live on a whiteboard, was closer to hazing than hiring. Googlers worked candidates into a cold sweat by asking them to answer inane questions like, “How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations are there in Manhattan?,” were found to be complete waste of time, according to an New York Times interview with Lazlo Black, vice president of HR at Google. Such practices do nothing but “make the interviewer feel smart.” Sadly, asking inane questions at other tech companies persists in Silicon Valley, according to Anna Wiener, who writes about the comical practice in her book Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (recommended).
The Best of Intentions
Google was created in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Sergei Brin and Larry Page, a story as legendary as Bill Hewlett and David Packard founding HP in a garage in 1939 and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak forming Apple Computers in 1976.
We all understood that Google had a lock on search and had little competition. But it was useful. It kept getting better. It understood what we meant, even if we gave it typos. It started finishing our phrases. It was a little creepy at first, but soon enough, we stopped looking over our shoulders and had to admit it was super useful. Then one day, without so much as an announcement, Google search began answering questions—any question—better than a Jeopardy champ, like “where is the nearest loco moco?” (don’t judge).
Google has been challenged for its anti-competitive practices by the European Union (EU), leading to $10 billion in fines, but that has done little to slow down the giant, says the Washington Post.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) also alleges backdoor dealings, with Google’s secret $12 billion deal to pay Apple billions to use Google search on Apple devices, a deal that effectively lets the two tech giants “control the Internet,” according to the New York Times.
Who’s Reading Your Email?
We’ve gotten used to ads that are served based on recent searches and even having our email read. After a public outcry and at least three anti-wiretap lawsuits (2 were dismissed and 1 was settled), Google said it was going to stop reading emails for keywords so that it could serve up relevant ads in our Gmail windows. However, in a July 2, 2018, report by the Wall Street Journal, Google has no problem selling access to your email to hundreds of other companies, and in one case, supplied 8,000 unredacted Gmail messages from unsuspecting users to a company that sells data to marketers to help train their software.
These companies are loosely monitored—if they are at all—according to the Wall Street Journal. In Uncanny Valley, author Anna Wiener’s memoir about her stint in Silicon Valley, she refers to a Mountain View “search engine giant” and (unrelated?) to her data-mining companies that turned on “God mode:” totally nonrestricted access to users’ data. This was done to help developers. “It was assumed that we would look at our customers’ data sets only out of necessity, and only when our doing so was requested by the customers themselves; that we would not, under any circumstances, look up the profiles of our lovers and family members and co-workers in the data sets belonging to dating apps and shopping services and fitness trackers and travel sites,” writes Wiener. However, nobody really checked.
In fact, letting employees read user emails has become commonplace in companies that mine data for marketing and other firms, says Thede Loder, former chief technology officer at eDataSource. “Some people might consider that to be a dirty secret,” said Loder. “It’s kind of reality.”
Google Ate My Lunch
So widespread was its use, Google officially became a verb in 2006, recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary. No one comes close to matching Google in search engine use. Therefore, we all contributed to Google’s success. The success of its search engine led to Google’s commercial success in advertising.
While we editors were seduced by the ease of using Google search and services, the tech giant was also stealing our lunch. One day in October 2020, Google allowed advertising. Google AdWords advertising started appearing along with our search results. In just a few years, Google became the biggest ad server, disrupting the whole advertising-supported publishing industry. As much as 42 percent of money spent on online advertising may be collected by Google, which has attracted the attention of the U.S. DOJ.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, makes billions of dollars in profit. Its wealth is so immense that it’s as if the company can only keep getting wealthier, with its coffers able to buy even more millions of servers across the world and bigger offices in all major cities.
The Jury Is Out
Google no longer flying the “do no evil” flag does not mean it is now flying “evil is okay now,” as at least one journalist has suggested. However, after events in the recent past, isn’t it time for a sober assessment of the company’s growing roots into our daily lives, as well as a growing and unconscious dependency on a few giant corporations? Yes, corporations are only behaving like corporations. To corporations, the only stakeholders that matter are shareholders. It’s not about profit but unrelenting growth. To expect for-profit corporations to have our well-being, happiness, and especially our privacy, even as secondary goals, is sheer naiveté.