There are tons of articles on the web that tell you why you should load JS libraries from Google. All of them are based on the trust that Google never goes down, never fails. It's a true assumption - they have so many data centers in so many places around the world that if one of them goes down next one will just pick up traffic and users will not notice anything.
This week this belief was turned down. On Thursday, May 14th Google services were very slow or inaccessible for at least two hours in the morning. Some experienced this for even longer time. Some felt like apocalipsis is here - the Great Google is not working...
Basically we could survive without some of Google services - at least there's Yahoo.
But for those who had their sites depend on Google it was a big disaster! Forget about Google Analytics that almost everyone has on their site - this is usually loaded in the bottom of the page code so it didn't have much of impact on performance. But if you have used one of Google Ajax Libraries - you'd probably load that one in the header of your page. Or Google Ajax Search which is usually located on the top of the page. This is where things were going wrong! Lucky people like I had a high chance that their page will never load because browser locks all processes on the page while any JS script is loading....
What did we learn from here? There's no ideal service that doesn't fail. Until this Thursday I could barely understand why my company would not go for Google hosted code - "If we fail there's not much you could do. If Google fails - you're f**ked up!". It's better to depend on yourself and have your page load 50 miliseconds slower than have it not loaded at all...
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If Google fails, it's the end of the world. Ironically, gmail had several very bad days.
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