Millions of people were cut off from Google's search engine, email and other online services last week sparking a flurry of frustrated venting that served as a reminder of society's growing dependence on Google's technology. via Google service stumbles - Technology - NZ Herald News.

The California-based company blamed the trouble on a glitch that routed too much of its traffic through computers in Asia, overwhelming its system so badly that about 14 per cent of its users encountered problems with the internet's most popular search engine. The mistake also affected Google's email and several other services.

The outages lasted for about an hour, according to Urs Hoelzle, Google's senior vice-president of operations.

Google's problems rippled around the web because other sites rely on its analytics service and draw much of their traffic from searches through Google. Many websites took twice as long to load and were twice as likely to fail during Google's disruption, according to Gomez, which helps internet companies manage their applications.

Before the repair, many people locked out from Google went elsewhere on the internet to express their dismay and despair.

There are two great principles at work on the internet. One is the end-to-end principle. When Doc Searls & David Weinberger launched worldofends.com they used a telling phrase. “Take the value out of the centre and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points.”

Google, despite our perceptions, is an edge technology, not a central one, but because of the other principle at work, we have made it central. That principle is the power law that says in any free market (and the internet is as close to free as we can get so far) a few people will gain insane levels of power while in the long tail, most of us will still manage.

The problem is, because of the power law and because of its massive utility, we have merged Google and web 2.0 thinking into the heart of our processes, and when it fails, as it will occasionally, we fail with it.

I had a discussion about a year ago on whether keeping health records in an encrypted text message on your cellphone, or hosting them on Google is the preferred option. Last week just reinforces my contention that mission critical stuff needs to be, at the least, backed-up locally at all times.

Where does that leave software as a service (SaaS)? What do you think? comments are open.

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