Gmail and Google+ experienced a widespread outage across the globe for roughly 50 minutes on Friday, January 24, causing as of yet uncalculated hours of productivity losses and at least a few dozen really solid tweets making light of the situation. Here are two of my favorites:
Whatever, I was unable to log into gmail before it was cool.
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) January 24, 2014
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
And this one:
Meanwhile, over at Gmail pic.twitter.com/vWDr9iuDis
— HitFix (@HitFix) January 24, 2014
It came as quite the surprise when hundreds of millions of users couldn’t access their inboxes. Really, who among us thought Gmail could go down? Well, The Onion did. America’s finest news source foretold of this very event back in March 2012 during one of the Onion News Networks’ News Blitzs, in which the anchor explained Google itself shut down Gmail as a way for the multinational corporation to flex its near omnipotent power (and get more downloads of Chrome).
Take a look at the news segment below. It’s not exactly prophetic, but it’s kinda timely almost two years later, and certainly worth a watch.