- Google went through a brief blackout on Thursday which was assumed to be due to COVID-19-related surged traffic.
- Google’s technical infrastructure works out in a way to handle peak events and it contains additional dimensions even if various things breakdown at a time.
- Google is taking multiple steps to ensure that the system continues to work fine during the surged traffic due to the coronavirus crisis.
Google experienced a brief disruption on Thursday. It was assumed that the outage was due to surged traffic caused by COVID-19 global lockdown as people are surfing through the internet more than usual. We assume that people working from home, housebound people trying to contact their loved ones by calling or texting them, and bored out masses trying to entertain themselves by continuously streaming videos online has resulted in the surged traffic over the internet. But Google says that it was due to a router failure and was not related to the said issue. The tech giant is taking this event as an opportunity to persuade its users that it can handle the surged traffic due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President for technical infrastructure at Google says in a blog post that the company’s operating system is designed to cope up with peak situations such as Cyber Monday online sale and surged video streaming during the World Cup finals. Cyber Monday online sale is an exclusive day for shopping when online sellers such as Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and JC Penney, etc offer their products at discounted rates. Majority of these companies rely on Google Cloud to host their infrastructure. Streaming Worlds Cup finals means there is an increased number of viewers watching utilizing services such a YouTube TV and Hotstar etc.
There was increased usage of the company’s service like Handouts Meets while YouTube consumption being consistent unlike prior times when it experienced a usage spike at night. The company’s system consists of high-quality fiber optic cables. These cables are spread around the world both in the land and sea. This helps the company’s data offices and the users to connect each other providing a smooth flow of data around the globe. This proves the statement that Google has additional dimensions even if various things fail to work at a time and the company has arrangements to cope with these types of situations.
- Also read: Google updates the Google Maps for businesses that are temporarily closed amid Coronavirus Pandemic
Google helps to limit the effect on the user’s local internet service provider by carrying the traffic directly to the user’s local ISP on its internal infrastructure. Google is also increasing its service providing capacity in those areas where it is needed and is restoring the services as soon as possible where outage occurs. The company is also helping the governments and other networks to stabilize the effect of surged traffic after the coronavirus global lockdown. The company has also set the default video quality of YouTube to standard definition.
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