This just in off the AP wire about a massive outage of Google's email and search engine services today due to "the routing of too much traffic through computers in Asia". Those computers crashed, of course, because they got overloaded. But if you read the article you understand that it effected the entire Web!That's right, so many sites have links to their analytics and ad services that any glitch or slowdown at Google will cause a slowdown on every site that uses them! Long page delays were rampant across the Internet during that time. Even I noticed it when my gmail icon kept turning into a question mark as if scratching its head!
This "spidering effect" shows how truly interconnected the Web is, and how a few overloaded computers in Asia somewhere can waste the time of hundreds of millions of people for an hour and cut untold numbers off from their email! Check out this article for what is described as a "fail whale" (that huge bulge you see in the graph above).
Let's do the math - a hundred million is a small estimate of the total online population during that hour and let's say that each one wasted five minutes because of those poor computers in Asia. That's a 500 million minutes, or 83,33,333 hours, which is 347,222 days or 951 years!
When overloaded computers can waste almost a thousand years of human time over the course of an hour long "fail whale" it's probably time to devise a way to keep that from happening! Or is it just me?
Hmmmm...the term is kinda funny if you think about it. "Artificially induced fail whales" anyone?
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