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Google outage takes down Gmail, YouTube and highlights issues in the Internet of Things

DECEMBER 16, 20209:43am
A look at what the idea of the Internet of Things is....
What is the Internet of Things?
Jack Gramenznews.com.au

... Google’s online services have been restored after a widespread outage, but despite only lasting several hours the outage was enough to expose a worrying side effect that is likely to get worse in the future.

While it was bad enough that the workspace portfolio of productivity apps including Docs, Sheets and Drive (that many businesses rely on) went down, so too did YouTube, meaning people who were prevented from working also had no way to procrastinate.

As well as what you’d typically expect to go down during a Google outage, there were also reports of other outages with “scary” implications.

Similar to what happened when Amazon’s troubled US-East-1 servers went down last month, people who had embraced the exciting future of the connected home and the Internet of Things (IoT) reported being unable to use their everyday appliances that rely on Google’s servers.

I’m sitting here in the dark in my toddler’s room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking... a lot right now.
— Joe Brown (@joemfbrown) December 14, 2020

It's nearly midnight and I can't dim my lights because a server on the other side of the world is acting up
— David is ~Stressy~ ???????? (@Davidramble) December 14, 2020

Me (3 Weeks Ago): “I should start to automate the house” Puts in smart bulbs, smart switches, synced to our Google Home.

Today: WHY CANT I TURN ANYTHING OFF! pic.twitter.com/9jQlH6fp2E
— eddie small (@smallindiana) December 14, 2020

Google's down so our thermostat stopped working. pic.twitter.com/tz9ARAmVDc
— Ben Nizan (@BenNizan) December 14, 2020

RELATED: Aussie terrorist’s sick emails exposed

While many were mildly inconvenienced, some have said the outage was a reminder of just how “scary” it is that we rely on a handful of massive tech companies to keep the world spinning.

A fitting end to 2020: #googledown

I bet the execs at Google hate such outages, besides the obvious $ reasons: it lets everyone know just how deep Google is embedded into the internet and into our lives. And its scary.

My kitchen lights stopped working due to #googledown -_-
— Gabriel Buta (@v_gabriel_buta) December 14, 2020

Are you locked in your Google Nested home when there is a global google outage? Who controls the temperature?
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 14, 2020

-26 and cant control the Nest thermostat remotely because google is down. One company goes down and multiple facets of life are impacted pic.twitter.com/80uJ9zd1Hi
— A F L O (@Mr_Aflo) December 14, 2020

I know people who think I’m some kind of Luddite because I have very few internet-connected devices, still own lots of physical media, control my thermostat with my hands, don’t have a spycam doorbell... but at least all my stuff still works when Google goes down.
— Mary Jones (@tlachtga) December 14, 2020

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When "Smart" Homes Turn Stupid: Google Users Literally "Left In The Dark" During Monday Outage

“Thanks Google, now I can’t turn my bedroom light on.”

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We couldn't find the content you're looking for.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I didn't see your reference to IOT (Where is it?) so my post was completely coincidental.

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http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62934&mid=11205
12#1120512

Pretty crazy since I've never talked about IOT before here and I only made that post a day and a half before you made this thread.

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But what idiot ties their lightbulbs, refrigerators, HOME SECURITY SYSTEM, BABY MONITOR, BANKING, and television to "the cloud"? Heck, I do my best to avoid that even on my cellphone ... There are some apps LIKE "calendar" that won't work unless you store your data on "the cloud". I don't use cloud-based apps. I know my phone is as open as a wide-open barn door so I NEVER do anything involving money on it, and I don't do email on it. I don't even keep the names of my nearest and dearest in my list of contacts. I assume that everything that's on my phone has been "scraped" at one time or another...

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The problem is, it's not about being an idiot or not. There are a lot of smart people who use this stuff. Certainly a lot of college educated people use it since only recently the prohibitive costs that used to be a barrier to entry have fallen pretty sharply.

All marketing and most coverage of these things tout all of the (obvious) benefits to using the new tech, but zero marketing points out the negatives, and the few "journalists" that cover any of easily provable bad things that are coming our way if we continue down this path are just called conspiracy theorists or otherwise dismissed.

It was actually a genius idea to make the Phone the centerpiece of all of this technology. While having a cell phone was either a business requirement for some, or just a cool convenience that fairly wealthy people had 25+ years back, we've now decided as a society that you're a bad parent if your kid doesn't have one with the GPS enabled.

Fear and shame, just like anything else.

And no matter how smart any of these kids are, they're growing up in this world. The older we are right now, the easier it is to live the rest of our lives without all of it. But they'll grow up with it and it will not only all be natural to them, but they'll feel all the peer pressure to keep up with it for the rest of their lives too.

(Because, honestly, even after all these years I still remember how difficult it was to deal with peer pressure as a kid in the 90's, and I can't imagine that the internet did anything but magnify that by about 1000 times. And besides... If you can forget about all of the terrible stuff that can be done with this tech, you have to admit that it all is very, very cool.)

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Seriously. I just don't understand people. Is it SO inconvenient to use a light switch?

This is just a miniature example of what happens when you try to "centralize" everything, and make "the government" or "the corporation" responsible for "taking care" of you. The Soviet Union tried that, and it failed. We shouldn't be heading down that same path because we will live to regret it.

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Originally posted by THGRRI:
I think this needs its own thread. SIG pulls most of her information that she posts here from this blog and stupidly defends it as a reputable source. As she continues to do so I will regenerate this thread to remind all it is a corrupted blog designed to create havoc rather than informing.

Below are the names of those behind zero hedge. Don't miss what I've highlighted in red below. This folks is why comrade troll SIG loves to quote zero hedge.

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Originally posted by THG:

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Originally posted by THGRRI:
I think this needs its own thread. SIG pulls most of her information that she posts here from this blog and stupidly defends it as a reputable source. As she continues to do so I will regenerate this thread to remind all it is a corrupted blog designed to create havoc rather than informing.

Below are the names of those behind zero hedge. Don't miss what I've highlighted in red below. This folks is why comrade troll SIG loves to quote zero hedge.

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In addition, Lokey said he faced constant pressure to frame stories in-line with a particular world-view, which he described as “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladmir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.”

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All of this matches SIG's playbook here and Putin's globally; exactly.

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The men behind zero hedge

Colin Lokey, a 32-year-old former Seeking Alpha director

Daniel Ivandjiiski, a 37-year-old Bulgarian-born former hedge fund employee who was barred for insider trading in 2008

Tim Backshall, a 45-year-old credit derivatives strategist
Despite its populist tone, Lokey told Bloomberg he recently left Zero Hedge because he didn’t see eye-to-eye with the others when it came to editorial vision.

“Zero Hedge ceased to serve that public service years ago,” Lokey said. “They care what generates page views. Clicks. Money.”

In addition, Lokey said he faced constant pressure to frame stories in-line with a particular world-view, which he described as “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladmir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.”

Lokey claims Zero Hedge’s focus on traffic and revenue is hypocritical, but Ivandjiiski sees things differently.

Finally, Zero Hedge addressed the accusations of systematic bias in its content.

“We are certainly ok with being the object of other’s conspiracy theories, in this case completely false ones since we have never been in contact with anyone in Russia, or the US, or any government for that matter,” Zero Hedge says.

The site claims it has never accepted a dime of funding outside of advertising revenue and that Lokey was never pressured about how to frame his articles or editorialized.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zero-hedge-unmasked-theres-more-1427301
65.html

According to the Bloomberg article, three men have been churning out all of the content at Zero Hedge, using the joint pseudonym “Tyler Durden” from the Brad Pitt film “Fight Club.” The 1999 cult film, according to Rolling Stone, is “about being young, male and powerless against the pacifying drug of consumerism. It’s about solitude, despair and bottled-up rage.” That ethos is frequently on display at Zero Hedge.

The three “Tyler Durdens” outed by Bloomberg reporters are Colin Lokey, who has now left Zero Hedge in a fit of pique and is responsible for handing over the internal chat sessions from Zero Hedge on traffic-building strategies and other matters. Bloomberg says “the other two men are Daniel Ivandjiiski, 37, the Bulgarian-born former analyst long reputed to be behind the site, and Tim Backshall, 45, a well-known credit derivatives strategist.”

The article notes that “Ivandjiiski has a multimillion-dollar mansion in Mahwah, N.J., and Backshall lives in a plush San Francisco suburb,” suggesting these are “not exactly reflections” of the anti-capitalism reflected in the moniker “Tyler Durden.”

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