Google says it’s impossible to prevent outages, but the company’s goal is to better alert the community when problems are detected.
This topic was discussed by Google’s Search Relationships team, consisting of John Mueller, Martin Splitt, and Gary Illyes.
On the latest episode of the Search Off the Record podcast, they come together to discuss what to expect from Google in 2022 and beyond.
One of the topics they discussed was whether there would be fewer outages this year.
Unfortunately, Google can’t make that promise.
However, you can expect more communication from Google when outages and bugs are discovered.
Here are some takeaways from the Google outage discussion.
Google outages will continue to happen
Interruptions absolutely continue to happen, so don’t be surprised when they do.
As Illyes said, Google runs on computers, and they often have outages.
Muller:
“So, I guess another theme that came up at the end of last year was having issues with search or having issues with outages in Search Console, and it felt like a lot of that happened. You think the search side will fix that so it doesn’t get any more Will everyone be happy when there is a disruption?”
Elis:
“I mean, we’re out of power. I mean, they’re computers. Computers have outages from time to time, and we’re trying to be as redundant as possible in terms of processing units. But we’re still going to have outages.”
As Mueller pointed out, blackouts appeared to be happening more frequently late last year, but that wasn’t the case.
Illyes went on to explain how this perception came about as Google improved its communication around interruptions.
Google is more transparent about blackouts
Google started talking more about disruptions last year, leading to the perception that they happen more frequently.
Rather than more outages, Illyes said, Google started announcing outages that previously went unnoticed.
“One thing to note is that we’re really starting to talk more about outages, and before, you probably wouldn’t notice outages because we didn’t talk about them and it’s only affecting a small part of the internet, for example.”
You can expect more of these exchanges.
Even if the search community doesn’t notice outages, Google still announces them when they are discovered internally.
“For example, we would declare outages even though the outside had not noticed them, or certain geographic areas had noticed them. At least people would think we were going through more outages. I think our SRE team, the site reliability engineers , they want less disruption, but it’s up to them.”
While it may seem like more outages are happening, that’s just Google acknowledging and talking more about them.
That’s not to say that more outages actually occurred.
Listen to the full discussion (11:45 min) on the podcast below:
Featured image: Coffee Prince/Shutterstock
