Internet erupts when Google goes down

First, you will see the endless spin of the wheel in your browser. Then one by one your app shuts down like 404 pages and “Oops, there was a problem” messages appear on the tabs and apps.

This morning’s Google outage lasted only a little over an hour. Gmail, YouTube, and a host of tools developed for workplaces, including Chat, Google Docs, and Google Drive, stopped working.

But what if, instead of getting back online, this downtime had lasted for days? While service failures are increasingly a trivial annoyance of modern, digitally connected work, they could be the signal that triggers the next sudden failure.

Our increasingly interconnected world relies on a shrinking number of Big Tech vendors to ensure our applications remain online at all hours of the day.

With people working from home, we also rely more than ever on video chat services and instant messaging applications for communications that could normally have been transmitted by walking to someone’s desk.

Hospitals have turned to telemedicine and GP appointments are increasingly being made via phone call or app.

In a few years, cars will be run almost entirely on software with artificially intelligent brains mapping the road ahead. What if all that stops working? Will cars stop ominously when security systems are activated? Hospital appointments pile up endlessly while someone waits for a Big Tech company somewhere to find the on / off switch?

While we don’t know what was behind this latest outage, there is another threat we need to be concerned about: cyberattacks.

A major outage or cyber attack around the world can seem like science fiction. But the possibility is there and has already been felt in many parts of the world.

More than a decade ago, in 2007, the United States and Israel were able to unleash a powerful cyber weapon, the Stuxnet malware, which wiped out Iran’s nuclear weapons program and set it back years. Imagine if such a tool turned against Britain’s power stations, or if a nation-state hacker could find a “zero-day” exploit in Google apps.

Cyberattacks that might look like something out of a video game are not just fantasy. Let’s take a recent zero-day exploit found in iPhone software.

A Google researcher was able to find a bug in iPhones that allowed a hacker within meters of any iPhone to automatically take remote control of them, even hacking multiple devices at once.

The most concerning hack of recent times was the 2017 Wannacry ransomware. This bug, created with cyber weapons stolen from the US security services, spread like wildfire among outdated Windows PCs, shutting down swaths of the NHS and costing £ 92 million.

Over the past two weeks, the stakes have been raised again. Nation-state hackers have once again stolen cyber weapons that it is feared could be turned against governments. And today, there are reports of another exploit found in a software vendor that works with dozens of national governments. GCHQ cyber spies are investigating.

The world is more connected than ever. Increasingly, this power is in the hands of a few tech giants who answer to shareholders first.

While they may have the tools and expertise at hand to minimize the impact of shutdowns like this one, the unforeseen risks that exist in cyberspace could one day find their weak point.

As one expert, technology investor Benedict Evans puts it: “The cloud is someone else’s computer.”

Sudden cuts, like Google downtime on Monday, should be a sobering reminder to have a plan B for when your apps don’t magically come back.

– Telegraph Media Group