Say what you want about Google – go ahead, everyone else does – but the IT professionals responsible for keeping Google users busily Googling rarely fall asleep at the switch.
Uptime monitoring company Pingdom kept an eye on 32 country-specific Google sites over the course of a year and found a record of sustained availability that would put a knowing frown on the face of the lonely Maytag repairman (R.I.P., Gordon Jump.)
When we’re talking about downtime numbers this small the differences are largely insignificant: Wherever you’re sitting, chances are excellent that Google is available.
Oh, sure, you can compare Brazil’s three minutes of downtime to Sweden’s worst of 48 minutes, but users aren’t going to notice the difference between 99.999 percent availability and 99.991 percent unless they read about it in forum such as this one. The U.S. site ranked No. 26 but that still represented only a half-hour of downtown in a year.
Yahoo’s as good or better, by the way, having gone 266 straight days without so much as a second of downtime.
However, it is worth contrasting the performances of the search engines with leaders in other industries, say banking – hello there BoA – and Web storage services.
There’s always room for improvement … although not much for Google in Brazil.
