Un-googled

24 hours of google disconnect - shows how dependent we are

For the past 24h the ISP serving PawPrint´s main office had an issue that prevented subscribers, including us, from connecting to any of the many Google web sites (including mail, maps, search, basically anything from the big G was offline) Despite everything else being just fine - it was amazing to see what an effect this had on the Internet in general.

Beside the obvious hit to loosing our normal web search tool there was a much more far-reaching implication. Instantly all those web sites using Google Analytics immediately ceased to function. Because the site won´t load without the Google Analytics API we couldn´t access literally hundreds of web sites that rely on this stats tool. Sites with integrated mapping were inaccessible as well, but at least in those cases the remainder of the content came through for the most part.

So what´s the lesson here? total dependence on a third party might be something to consider and consider carefully when configuring your web site. There are many other statistics options out there and if, for whatever reason, your customers can´t access your web site because of the methods employed to track them - the end result certainly doesn´t justify the means.

The "de-googling" has since ended and we are back able to search again but it was an eye-opener just how much of the web has elected to put their own business into place of being totally dependent on a third party.

Incidentally: PawPrint.net doesn´t use Google Analytics (for precisely this reason) and for both our web site and that of the majority of our customers this outage didn´t affect their web presence in the least.

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