The Internet has come a long way, as it now has become a necessity rather than a means for entertainment. Lots of businesses in various sectors depend largely on the internet. The important communications, bookings, and transactions are very dependent on the internet.
Recently, Japan came to a standstill, as the communications and the transactions stopped in the country. The main reason behind this problem was a small mistake made by Google.
This huge problem happened last week, when the IT giant updated its internet routing table. The internet routing table is a list of IP addresses. The company was trying to convey the web addresses owned by them; instead, they updated the list of the web addresses owned by the Japanese telecoms.
This causes an issue in routing, where all the Japanese traffic was sent to Google. This led to internet shutdown in the country. When the Japanese tried to access the websites, they were redirected to nowhere. According to the report, Google fixed this problem in 8 minutes, but the impact was felt for more than that.
Several important works related to companies, banks and railways among other started to fail. All these issues caused huge damage. The problem was so severe that the Japanese Government had to get involved and investigate this matter. The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry of the country had issued the telecommunications companies to submit the reports of this incident.
Google Spokesperson said to Asahi Shimbun, ““We set wrong information for the network and, as a result, problems occurred. We modified the information to the correct one within eight minutes. We apologize for causing inconvenience and anxieties (among Internet users).”
The mistakes made by Google causes a problem in Japan for few minutes, but it raises a big question. Suppose what will happen if these kinds of things happen for a longer period?
