The Worldwide Google Meltdown: Application Uptime Matters!

Google is one of the few companies that seem to run the world, so it’s no surprise the outage touched what feels like everyone. This week the internet giant has been facing application uptime issues with multiple services including Gmail, Drive, Maps and YouTube. On Tuesday, potentially millions of users were affected for several hours across parts of the UK, Europe, North America and Japan due to the ‘worldwide meltdown.’

The struggles of such a dominant provider should remind companies of all sizes that performance monitoring and testing remains a vital part of their infrastructure; no one is ‘too big to fail’.

Although Google has yet to reveal the cause of the downtime, in the age of instant digital response users immediately took to Twitter to complain about the unavailability of their favorite services, using hashtags such as #GoogleDown. In addition, many users poked fun at their own lack of productivity due to the outage.

Google itself gave an impeccably succinct answer to what quickly became the question of the day:

Despite the outrage on social media, it’s unlikely that users will abandon Google tools and platforms due to a single outage – but the practical impact on users is enormous. And as our recent consumer expectations survey, revealed, consumers have little tolerance for slow websites, often abandoning them within 10 seconds.

What can we learn from this? Companies large and small need to wake up to the very real possibility of an outage. Application uptime matters more than ever, and if Google can go down, your business most definitely can, too. To this end, integrating website, application, and API performance testing and monitoring into your product and business strategy has never been as critically important as it is now.

Find out how Apica can help your business ensure peak performance.