Where were you on Saturday when Google
Either way, Google's outage and the public's outcry at what turned out to be a simple DNS error is important. It's the last ritual in the initiation process. Welcome to the dot-com titan fraternity, Google! Here's your engraved paddle.
Yes, it seems like a cruel rite of passage. It's a shame that it takes something like a temporary knockout to make the public realize how much it needs you. However, Google isn't the first company forced to play hard-to-get.
In the 1990s, two of our real-money portfolio holdings -- eBay
eBay's downtime comeuppance came on June 10, 1999. The 22-hour outage cost the company millions in auction refunds, but combined with the briefer blackouts that it suffered that summer, it helped its bidders and sellers fully appreciate what they had when eBay was up and running.
Google's blunder on Saturday wasn't nearly as serious as the eBay and AOL service failures. But because the Internet has grown substantially in that time, even a brief outage by a popular online destination can create a whole lot of displaced users.
Just for kicks, go through some of the consumer brands and services that you rely on that happen to be publicly traded. Would you survive for a day without them? I'm guessing that more than a few of you are hooked to your daily doses of Starbucks
Read up on some of these celebrated outages:
- Yes, there was a time when even AOL was a fast-growing Rule Breaker.
- Shares of eBay have been hit hard lately but are still trading 50% higher than they were on its famous outage of June 10, 1999.
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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz thinks that if he suffered a 21-hour outage, no one would notice. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. The Fool has a disclosure policy. Rick is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.