There was a massive one this week Google failure take almost all of the company’s services with you Gmail, Youtube, journey, To meet and Docs all affected. It even crippled certain features of the company’s Android operating system, as mobile users cannot use apps like Photos and Maps.
The outage lasted no more than an hour, but it caused quite a stir online, highlighting the dramatic extent to which we are almost entirely dependent on the services of a single company in both personal and professional lives.
However, the impact goes beyond just exciting users, many of whom are so closely connected to the Google ecosystem that they would struggle to free themselves even if they wanted to. Since the services are only down for an hour, Google has also lost millions in revenue.
Google failure
While Google Search (the largest source of ad revenue) stayed intact during the power outage, if YouTube goes down, the company will lose a lot in ad revenue.
According to the Alphabet earnings report for 2019YouTube ads grossed a whopping $ 15.15 billion over the course of the year. On average, YouTube was responsible for ad revenue of $ 41.50 million per day and $ 1.73 million per hour (the rough duration of the outage).
However, as a leading analyst firm said TechRadar Pro, YouTube sales are expected to grow 30-40% this year. Based on the reported advertising revenue for Q3 this year Given these growth projections, it was estimated that Google’s losses from the power outage were actually $ 2.3 million.
While the outage also affects many other products in the Google suite, the rest is either free (e.g. Gmail), one-time (e.g. Nest) or subscription-based (e.g. Google Workspace) so that during the If there were no direct losses, they would have been offline for a short time.
However, the above figure also does not take into account the intangible losses the company could suffer as a result of the power outage. Understanding that they are entirely dependent on a single service provider, will businesses and consumers try to diversify as much as possible or even switch to a competitor? And could Google be the subject of costly legal challenges from companies that failed to operate during the outage?
While the loss of several million dollars related to Google’s annual revenue across all revenue streams is just a drop in the bucket, it’s important to put it in context. According to Figures from StatistaMidsize businesses in the UK (50-250 employees) are making just £ 294,000 (about $ 400,000) a year, 46 times less than Google’s hourly ($ 18.48 million) in 2019.
Numbers this big are sometimes too abstract to fully understand. They are difficult to work with and therefore easy to brush over. But could a very tangible incident like the Google blackout this week fuel the debates about the pragmatism and ethics of monopoly and turn the tide on big tech?