[SavvyGuard]

Today's breakdown was a huge warning flag for me. I'm heavily integrated with Google Services, and use Hangouts as my main messenger and SMS app on my Nexus phone. While Gmail was down, I couldn't respond to anyone who was using hangouts to contact me, couldn't share any documents on Google Drive, etc.

I'm going to have to seriously think about the risks of being so heavily reliant on Google services.

[markdown]

Yeah me too. Some of the greatest programmers and sysadmins in the world couldn't deliver 100% uptime. I think I'll have to take over and host my own services in my basement.

I'll show them how it's done!

[randallsquared]

Easy problems can become nearly impossible at scale.

[jmathai]

I'll take GMail with 99% uptime over running Horde in my basement with 100% uptime.

[Groxx]

You get 100% uptime from your ISP? Dang. Where can I sign up?

[packetslave]

Yep. If something has a "one in a million" chance of occurring, you'll run into it 17 times per hour (based on Comscore's Sept 2013 estimates of Google search volume)

[jaimeyap]

Are the alternatives any better?

If you run a service yourself, you will have downtime, only you won't have Google's amazing SREs and wealth of experience to draw upon to resolve your outage. You will have to fix it yourself.

If you depend on some other service, you are subject to their uptime and disaster recovery capabilities. Nobody is better than Google at either of these things.

But to your point, it probably is a good idea anyways to have offline backups of your critical data, and to have out-of-band fallbacks for critical communication in the event your primary channels have an interruption.

[taopao]

Good luck in your holy grail quest for that 100.000%.

[eitally]

No kidding. We're a Google Apps customer and, since all our employees already have a Google account, decided to use Google Auth for some internally business apps we've developed. While it sucked that Gmail/Hangouts were down, it royally sucked that our other apps were accessible. Even after Gmail/Hangouts came back online, Google Auth was throwing 503s for about another half hour. Boooooo!

[slowmover]

We should all take this opportunity to think about the risks of being so heavily reliant on X, Y, or Z.

[code_duck]

So you think that Google isn't going to be taking the effort to maintain as much uptime for its services as possible in the future?