According to reports:

Earlier today, Google users experienced a massive fail whale. Gmail was down, search was slow, Google Reader, YouTube and image search were all sporadic. Even Google Analytics and non-Google sites with AdSense ads were  reporting issues. Of course, most of the complaints could be found on Twitter. If you do a search for Gmail down or Google down, you will still find a storm of chatter.”

In a word:  Yikes!  The question this brings up isn’t really “what happened?” but more, where do you go for information on something like this when the place you’d usually go for information on anything is the place that isn’t working.  Google, as we all know, has long been a staple at finding anything, at any time.  When it goes down, where do users turn?

Looks like for now, they turned directly to Twitter, which was absolutely abuzz with information today.  Everyone, everywhere that was experiencing anything that remotely resembled issues with their Google-related service was Twittering it, and it rapidly became the best place to find updates, and other people that were struggling just like they were.

Things are back to normal for Google and all Google products, but it is still interesting to see what a world without Google would look like, even if it was just for a moment.  That world, in simplest terms, would be very different.  After all, it’s hard to optimize for search engines when the search engine itself is not working, now isn’t it?