Google crash: What are the alternatives for users in case of future outage

The vast suite of services provided by Google crashed for periods between 45 minutes to four hours in different parts of the world on Monday. The economic disruption caused by this outage was considerable because Google is such a massive presence across the digital ecosystem.
 

Let’s enumerate some areas of disruption. Google serves 3.5 billion users, which is approximately half the world population.

The most obvious disruption is search, of course. Search was not terribly badly affected in itself because search can be anonymous. As we shall see, services that need user authentication were hit harder. However, advertising revenue connected to search was affected.
 

A second area of trouble was video. YouTube is the dominant player in that space. A third problem area was Google Play – most apps on the Android OS are loaded via Play. YouTube and search outage impacts digital advertising since Google is one of the two dominant platforms (Facebook is the other). Somebody will surely calculate the average hourly ad-revenue loss. It’s more than most individuals make in a lifetime.
 

Now come to other Google services, “everyone” uses. One is Gmail. There are both commercial and free versions and Gmail is the default. Gmail going down caused widespread disruption. Most Android users rely on Gmail to store address-books, which might mean a horrific situation where it became impossible to phone somebody. Associated with Gmail, there are the Google Docs and Forms, which again are freely available and commercially important. Many small businesses think of Gmail, Google Docs and Forms as a lifeline. Even MNCs use Google Forms for their documentation and market research surveys.
 

Then there’s the cloud, and Google Drive, etc. The problems with the cloud affected other popular services such as Vimeo, Snapchat, Shopify, Pokemon Go, and so on, because these use Google cloud. Many people back up critically important and time-sensitive data on Google Drive.
 

Google DNS (domain name system) is used by many net surfers to navigate the Web quickly. Many businesses use Google Maps to deliver location-specific services. What with Play being down, even downloading alternative GPS map services would have been difficult.
 

Many financial transactions are pushed through on Google Pay. In addition, smart home gadgets, which work through Google Assistant, also went out of service. In a pandemic year, Google Meet, Calendar and Classrooms are absolutely mission-critical. There would have been classes postponed, meeting postponed and appointments missed galore.
 

According to the company, “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. As a result, we couldn't verify that user requests were authenticated and served errors to our users.”
 

Translated into less geeky language, it relates to authentication and resource allocation. Any cloud server — in Google’s case, a mega-bank of cloud servers — must know a user is authentic. The cloud system has to allocate system resources to every user.
 

Let’s say user Devangshu is entitled to use 15 Gb of space to store files, and allowed to use some small sliver of available computing resources and bandwidth to fiddle with what he stores. Presumably, YouTube and Google Play are given a lot more in the way of resources.
 

But the system must know Devangshu is not YouTube, and it must set quotas to ensure even YouTube is not allowed to hog more resources than needed. The resources may be dynamically allocated and will vary considerably but they must, absolutely must, be allocated according to quota.
 

That system broke down. The cloud was still working, apparently, since there was no data loss. But the system could not authenticate users and it could not allocate resources. This issue took around four hours to “repair”, although sundry services started coming back online in various regions at various times within this four-hour window.
 

What can any user do to minimise damage in case of a future incident of this nature? Build in redundancies. There are a lot of other players. Many are also free. Sign up and take the time and trouble to ensure you have continuity in case of another outage.

The alternatives
 

There are free services available in each of the following areas. They have their pros and cons. It’s up to the individual user to figure which ones work for them
 

Email: There are dozens of free email services. Protonmail, Aol, Yahoo are some examples. It’s possible to automatically back up contacts as well. This is useful.
 

Cloud: There are multiple free cloud services available. Mega, DropBox, IceDrive and, of course, Google Drive and OneDrive from Microsoft are among some. Blomp offers an incredible 200 GB of free storage. Samsung, ICloud, and other phone manufacturers also offer free storage for users. One warning: The Indian government often cuts off access to various clouds for obscure reasons.
 

Online video conferencing: Zoom is, of course, the other default option apart from Meet. UberConference, Cisco Webex are also popular. So is Skype.
 

GPS Maps: There are multiple free GPS-based mapping apps available. Waze and Map.me are brilliant if you’re travelling a lot. Apple Maps come preloaded on Apple devices. Mapfactor is purely for download and offline use, which can be useful if you’re in Kashmir.
 

Search Engine: Bing is the other default. DuckDuckGo is good and anonymous but the Indian government doesn’t want you to use it. Another anonymous search engine is Swisscows. There’s Baidu as well, for the China-friendly. Yandex is Russian owned and very useful in Russia and Eastern Europe.