It seems Google went down for few hours and the outage has hit sites who use Google products (like Google analytics/search) as well.
While the services are recovering (check the status), but look at the kind of impact Google’s downtime has on the world!
Sites which are running analytics, or have installed custom search weren’t responding (we too got some tweets regd. pluggd.in being inaccessible) – Google services like Gmail, Blogspot were not responding.
I am not sure whether Google apps was available or not – but if it wasn’t it would have affected the small businesses/institutes who use the ‘cloud’.
Result? Mini mayhem.
It’s like the entire www world has stopped, because the single entity that controls it decided to take things easy.
Dominance? Yeah baby, it’s GoD-ominance!
As you suggest, this is a significant hit to Cloud computing. We’d assumed because downtimes of this magnitude are rare that we didn’t need to worry about them. But as Google has shown, downtimes like this wreak havoc. Now imagine if the world was on cloud computing and their clouds went down!
As the San Francisco Chronicle says, “Because of the nature of technology, whether it’s Google’s or someone else’s …You’re going to get bitten by the beast.” (as quoted by Newsy)