That Google Outage Took Us Back To '99

Oh, Google, you didn't think Monday mornings were painful enough? If you've been trying to get any work done this morning, you may already have noticed that the Google's Chat, Spreadsheets, and Drive services haven't been working. Problems started becoming apparent around about 9 A.M. PT, and by 9:30 anybody wanting to chat over their Google account was flat out of luck — leaving us all to flail around aimlessly, typing our thoughts into emails and clicking "send" like a bunch of neanderthals. How on Earth did the internet users of 1999 ever manage this!?

This is the second major outage for Google-based services in 2014. The previous one came on January 24th, when both Gmail and Google+ went down. According to Google, the average user was only stuck for about 30 minutes, with about 10 percent losing access for a full hour.

So far, Monday's outage, while less problematic than losing Gmail altogether, has lasted a mite bit longer — it's been about two hours so far, and all the twitchy-eyed screen-staring in the world seems helpless to fix it.

Google is aware of the dilemma — on Google's App Status Dashboard this morning, they classified the outage as a service "disruption," rather than an "outage," which suggests a less drastic problem.

But for the time being, we can only wait, and hope that everything will be cleared up soon. The pressure this has placed on us to reflect on the detached, fragile and impermanent nature of our interpersonal communications is getting upsetting. So come on, guys! Google chat is dead. Long live Google chat!