So this morning around 6:50 my time, Gmail just... stopped. Not slow, not "having trouble connecting," just a blank white screen with that little loading bar that never finishes. I figured it was my wifi, restarted the router like an idiot, then checked Twitter (on my phone, over LTE) and saw the whole internet losing its mind about it at the same time. Turns out it wasn't me. Google went down, properly down, for something like 45 minutes this morning — Gmail, YouTube, Drive, Calendar, Meet, the works. If a site had "Sign in with Google" as an option, that broke too, so people got locked out of stuff that has nothing to do with Google at all.
I don't really care about losing Gmail for 45 minutes. I care that my thermostat stopped working.
I've got a Nest thermostat downstairs, the learning one, been running it for a couple years now and mostly forgotten it's even a "smart" device because it just works. Except this morning it wouldn't respond to the app, and when I walked over to just turn the temperature up by hand (you can still do that, it's not fully insane) it took maybe ten seconds to register the touch, like it was thinking real hard about something unrelated. I later saw people saying their Nest locks wouldn't open and their video doorbells went dark too, apparently the whole ecosystem leans on the same authentication backend that fell over. Which, fine, I get why architecturally that's convenient for Google. But it's the kind of thing that only becomes obvious to you at 6:50am when you're standing in your kitchen in socks, mildly annoyed, staring at a thermostat that needs the entire internet's permission to let you turn up the heat.
From what people were piecing together this morning it sounded like an internal issue with Google's authentication systems, something about a storage quota running out on the backend that handles account logins, not an outage of Search or the actual servers hosting anything. Which if true is almost funnier than a real outage would've been. Not a hack, not a cable getting cut somewhere, just some quota number ticking over to zero at the wrong moment and taking a meaningful chunk of the internet down with it for the length of a sitcom episode.
I complain about this stuff periodically and I'll do it again here: I don't think "smart" home devices should ever be fully dependent on a remote server for basic local function. A thermostat needs to be able to raise and lower a temperature in a house even if the company that made it has a bad morning. Same with locks, honestly especially with locks. It's fine if the app and the scheduling and the little usage graphs live in the cloud, sure, whatever, but the core physical function of the device shouldn't have a dependency chain that runs through servers on the other side of the country. I know this is an old complaint, I've made a version of it about other things before, but every time one of these outages happens it gets a little more obvious that we've built our houses on top of somebody else's infrastructure and just agreed not to think about it.
Separately and not really related except that it's also been eating my week: I finally sat down and played some Cyberpunk 2077 last night after everyone's been talking about it since it came out Thursday, and I get why the reviews from people on last-gen consoles have been so rough. I'm on a decent PC so it mostly ran fine for me, a couple of texture pop-ins and one NPC that just stood frozen in a doorway staring at nothing, but nothing like what people with PS4s and Xbox Ones are describing. If you were planning to grab it on an older console I'd genuinely wait a few weeks and let them patch it rather than dealing with what's apparently a pretty rough experience out of the box.
Anyway. Heat's back on, Gmail's back, the thermostat forgave me for yelling at it. Back to normal Monday, or whatever normal means in December of this particular year.