Over the past week, Google has faced a major problem, with its commercial and personal services suddenly suspended, and the discontinued services included Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Meet, Adwords, and Adsense.
Some features of the Android operating system have also stopped working, as Users of Android phones have not been able to use applications, such as Google Photos, and Google Maps in their phones.
The outage lasted only 50 minutes, but caused a sensation online, highlighting the extent to which we rely almost entirely on the services of a single company, both in personal and professional life. Google quickly apologized to customers whose services or business were affected during the incident, and promised to investigate.
Why Google's services have been discontinued:
The company revealed last Friday why its services were discontinued, which was the work done by the company to move to the user ID service, which deals with authentication of login data for accounts. The problem arose in October when the company moved to a new system to allocate system resources, leaving parts of the old system in place.
The crux of the problem was due to the reduced capacity of Google's central identity management system, resulting in the blocking of any service requiring users to log on.
How much losses is expected?
Google succeeded in keeping the search engine, the largest source of ad revenue, in action during the most-impact event, but the impact of YouTube resulted in Google losing millions of dollars in ad revenue.
YouTube's ads generated a massive profit of $15.15 billion over 2019, according to alphabet's 2019 earnings report.
Based on these figures, youTube's average daily ad revenue is $41.50 million, and up to $1.73 million per hour, the approximate duration of Google's service interruptions.
But these estimates are based on last year's revenue, while YouTube's earnings are expected to grow by 30 to 40% this year, based on advertising revenue announced by the company for the third quarter of this year, and these growth forecasts, Google's losses due to the discontinuation of its services can be estimated at $2.3 million.
But the outage didn't stop on YouTube, but it also hit many other services, including free ones, such as Gmail, or the subscription-based, such as Google Workspace. So Google's losses may be much greater.
All of this did not take into account the intangible losses that the company may incur as a result of the interruption of service, namely, the fear of companies and users of the total reliance on the services of one company to conduct their business, will companies and consumers seek to diversify as much as possible, or even become competitors?
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