Server Error
Millions of people a day rely on Google to search, email, schedule, map, work, study and YouTube. So what happens if it fails?
BY Richard Poplak
On a balmy Toronto day in late December 2009, 34- year-old Gregario Esteban woke up thinking of Jessica Simpson. Only he didn’t know it was Jessica Simpson he was thinking of. As he swung out of bed and pulled on his slippers, he was hanging on to the fading oneiric wisps of tanned legs tucked into cut-off denim shorts. Thing is, he couldn’t place the movie based on the TV show that the legs had come from. Was it Starsky & Hutch? The Dukes of Hazzard? The Beverly Hillbillies? All of the above? If there was one cognitive function Esteban had long since discarded, it was his memory. He guessed that it was safely housed on data storage servers somewhere in Silicon Valley; he had always assumed that it would be better preserved there than in his head.
Thus, it was with supreme confidence (later, when things were different, he’d think of it as hubris) that he opened his laptop in the breakfast nook and typed the following words into the Google search box on his homepage: “tanned legs cut-off denim shorts.” He waited for five endless seconds, until the following message appeared:
Server Error
Google is temporarily unavailable. Cross
your fingers and try again in a few minutes.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience.
He hit refresh. Another five seconds, same error message. With increasing unease, Esteban tried to access his Gmail account. Same message. He waited 10 minutes. Same again. That’s when the call came through. Google, he was told by a friend (who asked not be named for this article), was down. Kaput. No one knew for how long, or how long for. No Gmail. No Google Talk. No Google Earth. No Google. The company’s dozens of online applications, which covered the gamut from the utilitarian (Google Calendar) to communication (Google Talk) to infotainment (Al Jazeera.com English channel) were inaccessible; the vast deluge of human necessity reduced to a trickle.
This, thought Gregario Esteban, was what it must’ve felt like to be on that boat that sunk. The unsinkable one. The one from the movie with whatsisname in it…
As a species, we’ve dealt with technology long enough to know that anything can crash. There seems to be a reasonably inviolable relationship at play: the likelihood for a massive crash rises in inverse proportion to incrashability. Nonetheless, and despite living in an age of unparalleled circumspection, we have never trusted technology more. We trust Google more than most. It’s become something of an all-purpose virtual utensil, a Leatherman for the bits and bytes set. It offers an array of communications applications, it’s a great way to find a street address in Balkhash, Kazakhstan, and it serves as the most powerful mnemonic device in the history of, well, memory.
Google’s presumption of infallibility arises partly from the numerical mythology associated with the Silicon Valley-based company. Millions of people use Google every day in over 100 languages. Its net income was $3.1 billion in 2006. Between two and three million people earn a living from Google ads. The price per single share has nestled comfortably above the $700 mark, which makes just one a generous Bar Mitzvah present. As Joshua Green writes in the December 2007 Atlantic, “The computer world is in the midst of its next great transition, as many applications and services—word processing, spreadsheets, email, data storage—migrate from the personal computer to the internet.” In other words, most folks’ virtual eggs are jammed into one e-basket.
Just how precarious is the situation?
As Wagner taught us in the Ring Cycle, the Götterdämmerung does require the appropriate foreshadowing, and Google’s potential collapse has had such movements. On Monday, July 18, 2005, at 11:53 p.m., the following was filed on a massive forum called My 2 Cents, under a thread named “Google”: “Its too scary, when you depend on such service (Gmail), to find that you can not access your mail whenever you want to. You now never know if the server is up tomorrow...!”
John wrote, at 4:55 p.m. on August 20, “I’ve had the same problem with Gmail for the last 24 hours. It’s a damn kick in the teeth that Gmail doesn’t make any kind of an update available to the folks who rely on their service.”
Two years later, at 18:31 GMT on Thursday, March 1, 2007, on a frenzied thread that seemed driven more by caffeine abuse than the problem at hand, JamesF wrote on a forum called Gmail Help Discussion, “Hopefully three+ years of email have not been lost. My fault for trusting Google too much I guess! :-)” Half an hour later, bangaram wrote, “hi, i am logging on from india(hyderabad). i am also getting oops error for the last three hours. initially i got error 766 and now i am getting error 767. Regards.” There were hundreds of such posts, filed within a matter of hours.
As these messages indicate, it is by no means unprecedented for the free email service to take a breather from the heavy work of delivering mail to the masses. The U.S. Postal Service has an unofficial motto: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Free web services may rewrite it as thus: “Snow, rain, certainly heat and probably gloom may inhibit the smooth delivery of email messages to your inboxes. Also terrorism, server crashes and miscellaneous screw-ups. And regular shutdowns for maintenance.” APSampson wrote to those fretting on March 1, “Those screaming about how your life depends on this service: Please, calm down. It will be back up. For now, just take some time to get other things done. The world does not end b/c your email is inaccessible—I don’t care who you are.”
Google is, ultimately, a different beast entirely from the U.S. Postal Service. Postpeople do not answer pressing questions about Jessica Simpson, they do not disseminate outtakes from Everybody Loves Raymond (as YouTube, a Google company, does), they do not help locate a Starbucks in Prague. “Men, women, and children have come to rely so heavily on Google that they cannot imagine how they ever lived without it,” write the authors of 2005’s The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time, a hagiography that rivals only the Gospels in adulation-perparagraph. Indeed, the book has a messianic fervour; it uses words like “seductive” and “self-gratification” to describe the impulses of Google’s users. There is a version of Jerusalem, called the Googleplex, located in Silicon Valley, where the Brahmins gather every day. There are high priests—Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—who have established a liturgy and an intricate culture (according to the Google corporate website: “Bicycles and large rubber exercise balls on the floors, press clippings from around the world posted on bulletin boards everywhere. Many Googlers standing around discussing arcane IP addressing issues and how to build a better spam filter”). There is a Godhead: the 200,000 or so customized PCs, running on patented software, that implement an iteration of the founding formula—PageRank, which is an algorithm that assigns “a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents” on the internet. (In other words, it helps you find stuff online.) “Don’t Be Evil” is the company’s declamatory motto. The stage seems set for a spectacular meltdown.
How impossible is that notion?
Pretty impossible, if my buddy Larry, who fixes my laptop from time to time, is anything to go by. “The system is built for redundancy,” he tells me. “The purpose-built PCs may die, like cells in the body, but there are others waiting in the wings to do the same function.”
What if, I asked Larry, someone with a nasty streak nuked the Googleplex?
“Well, I can’t imagine they haven’t worked out an alternative scenario,” says Larry, sounding a lot like Billy Zane’s evil Cal Hockley in Titanic, who said, “It is unsinkable. God himself could not sink this ship.”
Larry went on to point out that nuking Google would be counterproductive to just about all of the West’s sworn enemies. “What would they use as a search engine?” asked Larry. “Terroristfind.org?” He makes a point: even modernity’s worst detractors have shown no aversion to information technology, uploading beheadings and fulminations with glee.
There is, of course, the scenario of full-blown financial collapse, à la Enron. How sound are Google’s finances? After all, Wall Street has been wrong before. Financial data, however, suggest that there are few companies in as robust health as Google. It carries no debt; it is meticulously managed. It seems beyond unlikely that a raft of pink slips would hit customized desks at the Googleplex any time soon, and that the utilities bill (it’s a big one) that powers those 200,000 PCs would go unpaid. Besides, there’d be plenty of carrion eaters, including competitors like Microsoft, which would be only too happy to pick through the offal for what remained.
I proposed to Larry one final doomsday scenario. What if some diabolical soul organized a free, week-long uncut Lord of the Rings marathon screening at a cinema adjacent the Googleplex? “I suppose the stereotype would suggest that the Google employee demographic would be sorely tempted, and leave en masse,” said Larry, hinting that I could perhaps use a sensitivity training class or two. “But there are few companies on earth that can count on employee loyalty like Google can.”
Cal Hockley, we may have found your unsinkable ship.
In his convincing doomsday science book The World Without Us, author Alan Weisman posits a world without a human presence. If we were, by some awful accident or murderous plot, wiped from the planet, how would the earth celebrate our departure? Rhapsodically, for the most part, if rhapsody can be measured in hundreds of millennia. Oh, there’d be little reminders of our glory days, like cyanide in the water and poison rainstorms, but mainly, it would be nature’s show to run. Here, I pose a metaphysical question: what would happen to all of the information Google has gathered in its 200,000 PCs? Would the earth have any sense of itself if it couldn’t be Google Earthed? Is information matter? Would it decay?
What these questions ask is not whether Google will one day pass from being—that is a forgone conclusion, even if that day is some ways off—but what does Google actually mean? If Gregario Esteban has outsourced his memory of Jessica Simpson and everything else to something called the Googleplex, then what is the worth of human memory?
Or maybe, just maybe, the frisson of panic that goes through such a large swath of humanity when Gmail accounts go temporarily offline is because PageRank—the most important system of information organization in the history of our species—is all we really have. Everything else—the buildings, the automobiles, the bling, our very bodies—is ephemeral. Only the collective mass of our productivity remains, albeit in code, in Silicon Valley.
Perhaps The Google Story authors’ tone was dead on— perhaps Google is a version of God.
On the fifth day, Gregario Esteban ate one of his shoes, and walked out into the madding city. Wild animals preyed on his neighbours, cars lay upturned in the street, the world was without purpose. Esteban could not Google himself, therefore he did not exist. He could not Google others; therefore they too were chimeras. There was no way to know what was what, who was really who, where exactly things were. Sure, there were other applications on the net, but they were crappy; he just couldn’t get the hang of AltaVista. He walked further into the unknown, wishing he could Google “apocalypse.”
