As you may know, recently (2020 December) Google was hit with an outage affecting many of its services like Google Suite, YouTube, Classroom etc. This lasted for about an hour.

Being one of the most popular and massive technology company, this incident did incite quite a lot of outrage in its users. Lots of people rely on Google's free and paid software. They require it for school projects to governmental work. They use Google's software and hardware in their homes. Does this raise some red flags?

The red flags

Google owns around 88% of market share in the search engine space. With their analytics software, ads, fonts and other APIs you could say they've invaded loads of websites. This website once used Google fonts. They dominate in the browser market with their Chrome browser.

Google's own ecosystem is part of lives, homes and companies. Their software extends from work to home.

One company controlling most of the web seems disastrous. It's until that company also has outages and privacy issues. They decide Mozilla's or open-source's fate.

What to do next?

I despise the common thought that massive corporations with cute, relatable or casual branding are trustable. Ignoring privacy in the 21st century will be fatal for the information age. Is it necessary to trust faceless corporations with your data for them to control what YouTube video to click next?

It's hard to live without the ecosystem but trying for a week will give a better perspective. There are better alternatives out there, it's just that people don't bother reviewing them correctly or using them.

This incident has proven that not only is privacy the issue, it's also the promised 24/7 (99.9% uptime) accessibility of data. Google has proven that no matter how big the company is, they can't have their services always online for you. Check out PrivacyTools.io to read more.