By CCN: Shares of Google are set to open lower when trading starts Monday following a network outage over the weekend that affected third parties and most of the tech giant’s services.
In pre-market trading, shares of the online search giant’s parent company, Alphabet, were marked 2.9 percent lower. Alphabet closed Friday trading at $1,103.63 while pre-market trading prices on Monday were $1,071.45.
Alphabet stock price chart | Source: Yahoo Finance
As previously reported by CCN, at about 3 PM ET / 12 PM PT Google’s Cloud service in the U.S. suffered an outage. This affected users of Gmail, Google Home, YouTube as well as other Google Cloud third party users.
Google cloud’s angry clients – snapchat, vimeo and shopify
Third parties that were affected included SnapChat, Vimeo and Discord. Some online stores on Shopify were also unable to process credit card payments for hours following the outage. With regards to YouTube, users reported problems while signing in and while watching videos.
Per Google, this was caused by ‘high levels of network congestion’ mostly in the eastern U.S. By 4 PM US/Pacific, the issue had been resolved. Google also promised to conduct an ‘internal investigation’ of the issue with a view of preventing or minimizing future recurrence.
Besides the eastern U.S., some countries in Europe and parts of Brazil were also affected by the network outage.
BSaitcoin enthusiasts bash google – see, we warned you against centralization!
Following the outage, crypto enthusiasts did not pass the chance to point out that despite Google being over a decade older than Bitcoin, the latter has enjoyed a 100 percent uptime, a feat the Silicon Valley giant cannot boast of.
Google is down.
Bitcoin never goes down.
— Alan Silbert (@alansilbert) June 2, 2019
This achievement, according to cryptocurrency enthusiasts, is attributable to Bitcoin’s decentralization, unlike Google.
Centralized (in spite of being distributed) versus De-Centralized.
— Harvey Carpenter (@wharveyc) June 2, 2019
Bitcoin’s teething problem
However, this is not to say that Bitcoin has had absolutely no network issues. During its early days, the cryptocurrency witnessed an isolated security issue dubbed the ‘Value Overflow Incident’. On August 15, 2010, a Bitcoin transaction saw more than 184 billion coins created out of thin air for three different addresses! This problem was however quickly resolved and no issue of that nature has been reported ever since.
Compared to Silicon Valley’s tech giants, Bitcoin isolated network issues are insignificant. In the past 12 months, for instance, YouTube has experienced downtimes severally. On January 8, YouTube users across the world experienced problems uploading and watching videos for hours.
A similar problem had been experienced with YouTube two months prior where the global outage took several hours before it was fixed. Gmail has also experienced a similar fate to YouTube with the most recent one, prior to the weekend outage, being reported in mid-March. And in late June last year Google Chromecast and Google Home experienced an outage for several hours.