Google Blog
On Thursday, May 14th, Google went offline. It took only moments before Twitter and Facebook lit up with people wondering if it was something wrong with their stuff or if Google really was down. Minutes after that, all of the amateur and professional journalists on the Internet were investigating the extent of the outage so they could break the news first. They missed that it had already broken right there on Twitter.

In the weeks since then, every one of the trade magazines we receive at our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing company included an article (usually an editorial) in which the author lamented the great risk of Cloud computing as demonstrated by the Google crash. I guess that makes it official that we've lost interest in Swine Flu. The next great scare for IT support services is that the cloud doesn't work all the time.

So back to the question that titles this blog. Did you notice that Google was down? I'm guessing not. First, because the outage lasted less than an hour. Second, because the rest of the Internet worked just fine while Google figured out a routing problem. Even if you'd been heavily dependent on Google's suite of services for your operation, I'll bet you could hav found something productive to do for that hour. And given that the average downtime for a server crash in a small business is well over an hour, one shouldn't feel better served by having the machine in the back room.