Google’s (GOOG) Gmail system, which serves millions of customers around the world, shut down yesterday. The problem may hurt its efforts to market applications which include e-mail to businesses. Google prides itself on the reliability of its software, at least according to its marketing pitch. It is not clear why Google had the problem. It keeps thousands of servers. Some of those may have developed trouble or some outside programmer, a hacker, may have sent a bug into the system to make it collapse.
Twitter, the micro-blogging service used by tens of millions of people, went off-line last month. It blamed the trouble on a malicious programmer in Russia who was trying to shut down the account of a user in neighboring Georgia. It is astonishing the the local actions of a small number of programmers can bring an entire Internet service to its knees, but that appears to have been the case.
Two months ago, hackers, probably from North Korea, were able to shut down or slow access to a number of major websites in South Korea and the US, another example of the Interent’s vulnerability.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U2-S8Fz4ZE&w=560&h=340&fmt=18]
The Internet is not invulnerable, as most people who use it assume. It may not even be reliable. Outages take major online services offline more often. The North Korean and Russian incidents show that a very small group of people can disrupt very large systems.
The Internet as the public has known it and used it for the last decade may not be the Internet for the future. The system is getting old and rickety, particularly for the volume of commerce it has to accommodate. The prophylactic software that was meant to protect the web is less effective. Like anything else the is used regularly whether it is a car, a light bulb, or a PC, the Internet is going to have to be patched and upgraded more often now. It won’t work every hour of every day anymore.
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Executive Producer: Philip MacDonald
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