Over the course of the last two months, Google was down several times. How is that even worth mentioning? Well, there was a time when I used Google to check if I had an internet connection if I couldn't reach a website. I knew that when Google wouldn't show up as well, I didn't have any internet at all. That changed.

And I'm not talking about the other services which are slow lately. Like Google Reader or Google Analytics on their launch date. If the launch date is all that's slow, I can live with that. I'm talking about good old Google.com, the ground for Google-fame and arguably what's still their most important single tool.

Now these troubles may turn out to have been temporary. But I can already imagine myself in 2007, blogging about "How the Google Empire Fell" and citing these downtime incidents as first signs... surely, that's the worst that could happen to Google, and quite unrealistic in the short term. For now, let's simply file these under "random outages that happen to any site."

That leaves one question: Which site do I check now when I want to see if I have a working internet connection? Yahoo, actually. I guess that was the site we used for that before Google came along, too...

And again, Google Images is down for many minutes. Google.com was down briefly as well. Google Maps is always semi-down for me.

Oh, and Analytics is down as well for the last days (at least their numbers).