Topic: Google down and out for 45 minutes on Monday- the perils of centralization (Read 370 times)

Exactly, I don't what is the manufacturing cost of a hard drive or solid-state drive but if you look at the price tags of tech gadgets before 5 years and now it gets a lot cheaper with very few exceptions so in the future as well it will get a lot cheaper and durable in my assumption. But you don't actually understand my point, no matter how much it cost you are not supposed to give your personal details to someone for their benefits.

There are some ISPs that do block traffic traveling through port 8333 (the port that bitcoin software uses by default). This is mostly schools, libraries, and employers wanting bitcoin traffic not to take up their limited resources.

ISPs can also see where your internet traffic is going unless you are using tor or a VPN, in which case, your ISP would be able to see the VPN or tor server your traffic is going.

The cost of producing solid state drive is very low, it can get down to the point of 0.1x of current price eventually, the licensing fee is keeping the price high, you do compare chip between x86 and ARM, you quickly discover the two cpu have a vast price diff despite they did the exact task, when the licensing is expired or somebody invent an open source ssd design (ARMV ssd??), you would likely stunned by how much data you can get for the equal buck, until then we would likely consume a higher price tag.

Google offers service for free but at the end they are selling your data, are you okay with that?

I never wanted someone to keep track of all my activities and keep seperate database on it which is the most unacceptable thing for a common man to undergo. While saving our data into our own drives may get cheaper and more durable in the future with technology development but still going to be expensive if you compare it with free service and data cost.

+1 to this. A lot of people forget this.

Decentralization can only really exist because your ISP is letting you do so. Obviously all of this traffic is encrypted, so they're only able to see the type of traffic which is occurring though they could use this to block bitcoin nodes and cripple the network. Though that would probably cause issues with other types of software in addition to bitcoin.

There really isn't a lot you can do now to stop centralization. Supporting local networking infrastructure / hosting options could be something that people do to ensure that there is proper competition in the market. But they're only going to do that if the cost is in the same area.

Yeah data is not free, but on a bright note, it’s getting cheaper, although it won’t be getting to the point of cost absolutely no money, but I believe it’s as good as free but a little more costly, when google decide to remove data, you know it’s not even cheaper to use google anymore, it’s actaully taxing you more money than you kept it on your own custody, that’s very profitable to google to make money out of cheaper storage but making it pricier for the end user like you, which is better? Keeping on your own where storage are getting cheaper or kept it with them where they will keep the price high to rip you off?

Sensitive details and content videos are not the same so why we need to compare the yotutbe platform's benefit and potential in this modern world when we want to save our private details in our hard drives. You agree that saving files on our own is not free and simple then do you every wondered why google offering it is for free?

You and we become the product when we get them for free so use it wisely, just don't get trapped into it.

I didn’t understand what was going on with google and couldn’t reach out to any reliable source for information. I was only able to know about the situation from my telegram group. When some of my colleagues complained of same inconvenience from google.

Every drive would eventually break just like any other electronic component, they don’t usually last a nice 10 years, and using it for online hosting would be even more challenging considering the I/O rate everyday, you might be lucky to have last a nice one year before some of the chips breakdown or the SMART check failed, and yup online hosting in a scale as large as google is out of question for individual who want to host their own video site with their own computer,  their own hardware and harddisk, our server can at best serve a dozen of users at a time before the server reached its limit. Can’t imagine the load when the server need to handle hacking attempt too.

There is no doubt google have provide the best video market place, YouTube is the only one of its kind where it’s the front runner of all the cutting edge, easy consumption of video content, you can’t compare it with all other sites, (amazon, Netflix etc) the video content categories cover nearly every thing of interests, and content creators upload so much videos that basically mean everybody would find one or two videos that they will like out of millions of the video on their platform.
That’s also indicate a lot of users depend on the platform to make a living, there is quite a few of them stream to get money some couple years ago, and I believe today there is even much more, the perils of the platform would have quite massive impact.

It is not an uncommon occurrence for there to be over an hour between found blocks when the average is supposed to be 10 minutes.

If you are running a full node, there is a good chance that you are connecting to other nodes via google infrastructure. If you are running a full node, you are certainly relying on a centralized ISP to connect to the internet.

Decentralization has its purposes, but it is not the solution to everything. The overall performance of google products is likely greater than a hypothetical decentralized service that can help with similar tasks.

The crypto was also indirectly effected by this outage of google services.  At that moment i try to login on an exchange and need my 2fa code which was sent on my gmail account. Since i was not able to open the gmail, i had to wait login in the crypto exchange until i have access to my 2fa in the email.

This was the first time when i experienced this. All of the google services like gmail , youtube were down. Being a company as big as google, they could not afford this downtime when almost all of the world are dependent on their services. They should have a backup disaster recovery plan so that the customers do not face any downtime.

I did not experienced this maybe because I was not online when it happened and this is the only time I read that it happened they have able to go up fast so not everyone notice, only those who are using their service, they should make let it happen again, so many people are using their services, they want to people elsewhere.

Don’t underestimate how reliable you harddisk might be even under extreme catastrophe there is still slim chance of recovering the data inside the harddisk, it might take a lot of effort or money, but you can’t compare that reliability with the online counterpart, the only way you can loss everything data is keep it in custodian online harddisk where the google have all the say on “their data not your data anymore since you agree on the term” bullshit agreement,  your harddisk, given its aged and some hardware broken, it’s still recoverable by fixing it slapping some new chip board and run some expert data mining tool to recover all the binary under the metal.

You have a chance of losing your data when stored in a hard disk when it faced physical damage or ageing factor but google drive is not an alternative because it's like you may lose your money to scammers when it gets stored into your own bank accounts so you are having so you wanted to put into someone's bank account so you will never lose.

Storing anything sensitive data into any online drive is highly risky.

Over the years we all should experience minor glitches on google service, it’s too often some video just simply don’t load for no reason, we would blame it on our side or the server side,  but why don’t assume it’s just some part of the server that’s outrage for a while. And this one last for 45 minutes and account for all services, that’s massive one outrage, I’m glad to move out from them as fast and as far I could, this backup isn’t as reliable as my backup hard disk too, when the disk corrupted you know the pain to get them back again, can you risk that again?

Yup you can still redirect all your traffic your subscribers to your own server hosting your own YouTube server in php, before the time run out of course.

the devs making bitcoin in the single github that everyone copies is the single point of failure

this has been proven in 2015-17 where a certain dev group disavowed access to other implementations. and forced a change to the blockchain on august 2017 using a mandatory activation

also by tweaking the blockchain and thus the code that miners use. they can then force people to upgrade to match the new codebase just to re-gain access to node connections and block/transaction data relay.

once you realise bitcoins "decentralisation" promise is not the same architecture from pre 2015 as it is post 2015
 you wil realise the comparisons of "decentralisation"  vs google does not apply

im a bitcoin hoarder for 8 years and will remain so. but i prefer to see the flaws and understand the limitations and be very transparent about it.

bitcoins decentralisation is not as you may believe.
bitcoins bottlenecks/points off failure are not as it seems

remember bitcoin can only handle a quota of ~2500tx /10min average.
google handles millions a minute.
bitcoin has had many times where no new confirmed transactions occured for more than 45 minutes
today block 661717->661718  57min gap


again i am not anti-bitcoin. i am anti-false promises

I had seen that coming, there is no doubt it might be pointless to be number one subscribed user on the video channel, but a matter of time would erase all that achievement, you may have got some golden play button, but all your ten years worth of sweat and blood goes into dust just because a network go down just like any other MMO RPG.

To be fair, Google Search was fixed really quickly because they understood "the internet" to 99% of the world means Google Search.


We may not have a single point of failure but it's also nearly impossible for us to weed out a bug or vulnerability (or nuisances like below) from all decentralized nodes.

Imagine Google Images decentralized and it gets a controversy like this: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai , there would be no way to force all the nodes to use the updated algorithm. People would in fact stir trouble by mass running older nodes with this blemish and further damage Google's reputation in a way that's impossible to repair.

These outages not only hit regular people trying to use their google accounts, it hit people in education, google workplaces (gsuite), and so on and so forth. It's really crazy to sit down and think about how much google controls in a persons life, and how an outage could literally just put their life on pause for a large amount of time.


Email, Calender, Play Store, Google Classroom, literal HOSTING OF WEBSITES, and so on.

Google, like any other company who maintained a crazy grip on services, will lose its footing to another rival. That's Capitalism.


Not exactly sure on what is being said here. This seems like a pretty normal outage. Google could block anyone they don't want using their services at any point for any reason. Why would they need to cause massive issue for millions of others to achieve that goal?

I'll wager that a significant percentage of the 'outages' we'll see will be associated with a re-implementation of big parts the internet and supporting infrastructure in order to correct some 'defects'.  The main 'defect' being that it allows people to exchange information without 'proper oversight'.

The tech giant finally took a hit!

One curious fact I heard about the Google outage on Monday was that while you couldn't access the website through your normally browser, you could actually still access it if you switched into incognito mode. Unfortunately I was too late to try it out myself, but if it was true its a big thing in my opinion. It could mean that some form tracking wasn't working properly and that's why we couldn't access the website.

in a fair comparison to bitcoin.
its like the block size quota only allowing certain amount of transactions per 10minute average block

bitcoin has had many mempool bootlenecks

I think it's already too late for us to stop using Google accounts and other centralized companies on the surface web because ever since we started to use the internet, we have created and have been using different social media accounts on the internet, so I think it is already enough that we have surrendered our personal information from a centralized company.

Well, people seem to rely heavily on centralized companies and probably don't realize how dangerous that is... not only in the area of network outage, also in privacy, transparency, accountability, security etc.

You don't trust or rely heavily on any internet company that is centralized, not very Transparent, not Privacy-friendly, not Censorship Resistant, that can have important information/data deleted without trace etc. When I realized some of this fact, I stopped considering them for serious/long-term usage.

If only the internet would be decentralized, the world would have been saved of such an outage. An incident of this magnitude further shows the superiority of the decentralization ideal of blockchain. It's impossible for a DLT network to be down because a couple of its nodes is down. It's time these tech giants began to experiment with these blockchain features, but would they? Centralization gives them a lot of power that they can wield for their own gain.

Good for you because there are groups  who had updated you while mine is none,i thought that there is a problem in my Unit then i checked in Mobile but same response so i believe that Google was hacked or something deep trouble happens.

Then i tried using other browser to clarify my belief and yes it works in other browser.

now i am doubting google to be more dependent instead will have some other browser to make my activities safer and less hassle .

That outage from google made everyone including me to worry about some files that we needed to access during that time. I thought that I'm having a problem with my internet connection but it seems good and it's only Google that's experiencing a problem at that time.

This is really a problem for those companies like google that can't be avoided. I wouldn't compare this issue to anything related to crypto/blockchain.

With the bulk data available on Google and the continual increased usage, this @Outage is bound to happen just that, its not expected of tech giants like Google following it's long term of service and suffestication. This is actually a sign of more outages yet to come and how centralized system of network sucks. This calls for a decentralization of the system but, I don't see this happening as I believe (not a proven fact) government regulations and participation on the system has already eaten deep into the fabrics of it's management as it's used as a major spy window on citizens especially in the developed world. So, a decentralization of the system would be a blockage to this spy windows and would be idea for government so, a change from centralization to decentralization seems impossible.

I faced this yesterday. I thought it's my problem. All other services were working well. I am heavily dependent on Youtube. Luckily, I am in some international Telegram groups. I came to know about this problem.

However, it reminds us of decentralization.

This is another failure of centralization of the internet, if the internet is decentralized and the web 3.0 evolves, this kind of thing will not happen as it will be more robustic and powerful just like bitcoin blockchain. That said, if taking bitcoin blockchain as an example, bitcoin blockchain has never been compromised before just because it is acceptable by people as miners protects it, web 3.0 will also be similar and will be protected by people just like in the case of bitcoin blockchain not by centralized body like google and the likes, and will never cease in operation like google just did for 45 minutes yesterday because it will be decentralized

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According to a tweet from Google, the company suffered an “authentication system outage” that essentially rendered a wide variety of servers useless for about 45 minutes because the system was unable to confirm users were who they said they were. It seemed to largely affect Europe and extended well beyond what people might normally associate with not being able to get into their email. On Android smartphones, for example, native apps like Google Maps ceased to work, and internet-connected devices through Google Home were seemingly also down.



From Gmail and Google Calendar to YouTube and even Google’s two-factor authentication, the outage temporarily ground online work to a halt for many, including publications that would have otherwise been reporting on the outage. “If an internet giant like Google can suffer such a major attack – denying millions of users access to basic internet services – it just goes to show that under the surface of the shiny web interfaces we see, internet infrastructure actually hangs in a delicate and vulnerable balance,” said Jaro Šatkevič, head of product at Mysterium Network, an open-source Web 3.0 project focused on decentralizing the internet.
https://www.coindesk.com/google-down-the-perils-of-centralization