What would happen if Google were to shut down for 30 minutes?

Google has helped in structuring and organizing the vast information in the world for easy access for internet users, students and researchers. Individual and business life depends on Google; we began our day on Computer from opening Google.com. Did you know what happened If Google was shut down for 30 minutes?

In August 2013, Google and all of its services came down briefly for 2 - 3mins. And the whole internet traffic went down by a massive 40%.

Note that it was just for 2mins. Imagine 30mins. Its highly unlikely but here is what I think will happen

First few mins people will check their internet connection. Some will even call their Service Provider. Some may even check for hardware failures on their side  which is still more likely than 30 min outage

Internet is not Working

People will then realize that its true. There will be a period of disbelief. People will desperately try to reload Googles homepage.

People all around the world will start taking screenshots of the Google Server Error Page. [Likely 500]

Google Oops -Server page

Your Facebook Newsfeed will be full of OMG Cant believe, I witnessed something astonishing along with several images from previous point.

People will search for alternate search engine, but how? Most of them don’t even know that there are alternate search engines 😛

Bing and Yahoo will get huge traffic surge.

Bing Search Engine

DuckDuckGo( Page on duckduckgo.com ) will start trending on Twitter. People will realise its good. (That’s a search engine that doesnt track you BTW)

Duckduckgo.com

Many other internet apps  that uses Google Services in backend will also come down. Without GMAIL for 30 mins the productivity across the whole world will drop by a huge margin.

I cant even imagine the Revenue Loss  not just for Google but for all the companies throughout the world that uses Google.

Android users will be stranded on the roads and iPhone users will be lost in the lanes if Google Maps stopped working for 30mins **

Among all this fiasco Internet life in China will remain unaffected. ***

Google Banned in China

People at other competitive companies will enjoy and sing songs 😛 (Meant to be a joke)

After the outage is fixed and services are restored:

Google will release their statement to press  explaining the cause (may be)

Tech Savvy people around the world will try to dig deep in search for the cause of outage.

Many will speculate that a group of Hackers are responsible. People will then approach many Hackers regarding their opinion

Media will go crazy. They will call experts and try to analyse situation themselves.

Many bloggers will write post about “How we are too dependent on Google?  A reality check. Even Media will do it

Quora would be full of questions  Why did it happen?, What do you think about the outage?, Can it happen again ?, Was my data leaked?, Is it true that Google was hacked ?, etc.

A lot of users will switch from Google services to alternates.

BuzzFeed and ScoopWhoop will have articles like Google went down for 30 minutes. “You wont believe what happened next. and “10 things to do when Google goes down the next time.

People will find this answer and realise that many of it is actually happening (Again, meant to be a joke)

Eventually if it keeps happening people will switch to alternatives. Googles revenue will decline and they will lose the monopoly. People will move on and build better products. Google engineers will have to hunt for jobs again. A lot of them will start their own companies.

Source: Quora.com