Page 78 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 10

COMMUNITY Reflection

When Google Dies

Chioma Phillips

he month was December, of the smartphone game Pokémon world a demonstration for ¾ of an
in the year 2020AD; the Go, for example, reporting being hour. Shock, surprise, bemusement,
year that was. Millions of unable to log in.” fear and even frustration were some
TGoogle users around the of the immediate reactions by users,
world were suddenly unable to ac- As the BBC said in their article but the long term response needs to
cess services such as Gmail, Google on the outage, “The Google crisis go deeper than that.
Docs, YouTube, Google Drive – in may have been brief... but it was an
all about a dozen Google services. unnerving reminder of just how de- You see, I believe that those 45
For a disconcerting 45 minutes pendent millions of people have be- minutes were a gift to the world
tons of documents, information, come on services in the cloud.” As of private and corporate users of
passwords, images, videos that had a Twitter user said, “I’m sitting here cloud services in general. You must
been ‘safely’ preserved on the cloud in the dark in my toddler’s room remember that Google’s “mission
somewhere, services so interwoven because the light is controlled by @ is to organize the world’s informa-
into people’s lives that they couldn’t Google Home. Rethinking... a lot tion and make it universally acces-
have imagined having to do without right now.” Yes, one does need to sible and useful.” For decades I
them were utterly and completely rethink. In a world where billions of have watched as they did just that,
cut off. In a Tweet, Google attribut- people have submitted their content not only by signing on millions of
ed the “authentication system out- to a remote location accessible to individual and business users to
age” to “an internal storage quota them only through a device and an their every growing base of services
issue”. According to an article on internet connection, just how much but by gathering and managing the
bbc.com, the outage had a “knock- control have people given away? information shared by billions of
on effect on other apps, with players Monday 14th December gave the people across the world to make

78 | Heal . Restore . Rebirth . Afrika