Google Blackout: The Fallout

As promised, Google (GOOG) has explained exactly what caused yesterday's meltdown and threw millions of Internet users into panic and despair. In a blog post yesterday afternoon, Vice President of Operations Urs Hoelzle claimed that a system error routed a significant share of Google's Web traffic through servers in Asia, backlogging the system and grinding much of Google's services to a halt. "Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia," Hoelzle wrote. "And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected."

Despite the inconvenience, yesterday's collapse offered a useful snapshot of just how indispensable Google has become to the world. Think about it: Only 14 percent of Google's Web traffic was inconvenienced by the snafu. But that 14 percent was enough to throw the country into chaos. Gmail, business and social calendars, companies' internal documents—all of these were rendered inaccessible. Frantic Twitterers started banging out tweets: Is it a worm? Is it conficker? How will I get those spreadsheets now? And some people even learned how to use Yahoo (YHOO)—now that's what we call desperation.

Over at PC World, writer Ian Paul found a report by the security company Arbor Networks, which declared that in some areas, Internet use simply stopped altogether. If you can't use Google, people seemed to be saying, what's the point of going online at all? Paul adds what we're all thinking: This cloud computing stuff sounds nifty, what with being able to access your files wherever you happen to be and freeing up storage space on your computer and all. But when Google shuts down—and this makes at least the third time this year that a Google glitch has rendered many of its services inoperable—your entire life simply comes to a halt.

Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy tells the San Francisco Chronicle that this incident only highlights just how close Google has come to resemble a public utility and argues that it should be regulated as such; it "behooves policy-makers to look more intensively into its operations," he said. That's the downside to Google's mammoth success: Sooner or later, you're not just offering a useful product, but something the world cannot do without. And however unfair it seems, the public will start pushing the government to step in and start telling you how to run your business. It will be couched in antitrust terms, but you can't make a plausible argument that Google has used its market share to illegally squeeze Yahoo or Microsoft (MSFT) out of the search game. Google has merely gotten that big by being that good. And now the public may no longer be willing to let such an important resource lie solely in the hands of one company.

Or maybe they'll just back up their hard drives.