Google Went Down... Now What?

So Google had a major outage this morning that lasted about a half hour. Luckily it came back up, but within that half hour I realized just how much I rely on Google.

1. When my alarm went off, I said "Okay Google, please turn the lights on" but Google responded that it had a problem and to try again.
2. After manually turning my lights on thinking I'd have to reset my plug I said "Hey Google, what's today's weather?" and got a response to try again later.
3. I picked up my phone and went to check some things only to see login errors on a few apps.

Now I was getting mad and thinking my wifi was out or something so I switched my phone to data only to see the same issues. By the time I left for work Google was restored but this morning was an interesting wakeup call. Think about it. How many of us subconsciously (at this point) use Google for daily tasks? Any application, including Zoom, that I normally click "login with Google" didn't want to let me login this morning. 

Google Workbench Dashboard

Now imagine our students. Many schools use Google Apps for Education on a daily basis. During this outage, students couldn't access Google Classroom, Google Meet, Gmail, and more. Schools couldn't send out emails regarding the outage because Gmail was down too. So these students would see the site not working and that would be it. 

So we as educators need to start making some changes to the ways we do things. Perhaps relying exclusively on a single platform is part of the problem. You wouldn't invest your lifesavings in a single stock so perhaps we shouldn't invest out entire educational process on a single suite of softwares. Diversify. Maybe use a few products from Google, a few from Microsoft, and then a few smaller umbrellas such as Nearpod. This way if one goes down, everything doesn't just stop.

What do you think? Leave a comment on this post and let's start a discussion. Collaboration has always been important in education, so let's collaborate on troubleshooting a "one time crazy situation" that can and probably will eventually happen again.