I just received a message from Shopify which powers my Secrets of Organ Playing Store saying that they suffered interruption of service yesterday:
On June 2, Shopify experienced an interruption of service by Google Cloud that made all stores inaccessible for approximately 5 hours. We’re writing to let you know that all stores have now recovered.
I don't know if any of my customers noticed this since in the afternoon there was one sale but if all merchants who are selling something through Shopify couldn't do this for 5 straight hours, it is kind of a big deal.
Shopify is a centralized company and Google is centralized company also. Shopify's service was interrupted because Google Cloud's service was interrupted.
So potentially every company which uses Google Cloud might be vulnerable too. This could be thousands or even millions. I don't know for sure. Techcrunch reported Google Cloud affecting numerous applications and services, including Discord, YouTube, Vimeo, Gmail, Snap and many others. I have noticed some disruption with my website which runs on Weebly too.
We know the problems with centralized companies - they lack transparency about people's the data they are using. They censor certain opinions they don't like. And they might be more vulnerable than decentralized networks because they have a single point of failure.
With the blockchain such as Steem which is decentralized all those problems can go away. Every transaction is transparent, there isn't really any censorship and as long as there are multiple witnesses running the nodes, there isn't any single point of failure.
I hope the world will start to understand this as we go into the future and we are more and more dependent on technology in our lives.
The way I see it this outage is one more problem with centralization which is one more reason for decentralized Steem blockchain push for wider adoption.