Well it certainly has been an interesting weekend as far as the Internet was concerned this weekend. I'm refering to google classing everything as bad for you on Saturday and then Monday morning (not the weekend I know but meh) rail websites not working. Thinking about it it is quite worrying how much we rely on particular websites and we now just take them for granted. The Google corperation has a large proportion of these websites that everyone just takes for granted but of course there are many others. I'm sure many people out there use Firefox and this actually has its default homepage set to Google search. However although millions of people use google search and take it for granted what would happen if it just went overnight? I;m sure some people dont even know of other search engine and would need google to do a search for search engines! Well on Saturday morning some muppet mucked up and all of google's search results could apparently be harmful to your computer should you visit the site. For the geeks out there this would be a problem as the error page would come up and you would just copy and paste the url and continue as normal, but what happened to those people who didnt think to do that, or didnt know how to do that? Well I guess they just went away and come back later when it was all fixed none the wiser. Well just a thank you to Google for fixing it quickly and a big thank you to the numpty that pressed the big red button that says DO NOT PRESS in the first place! (Here is a news article about the problem http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/0131google_malware_snafu/)

The next thing I discovered was on Monday morning. Because of my current situation of being redundant and not having a car I'm having to get trains and lifts to places. So normal morning when I'm going back from my girlfriends house and oh would you look at that snow, how nice. On the way out the door I figured lets just check the trains are running on my phone so onto the Internet, Google loads (no problems, yay!), search for national rail and get the result back fine; then the problems start - I cant get onto the website. First thing you think when you cant seem to get somewhere online on your phone, must be bad signal (was in car at time). Nope not that and after about 10 minutes I just gave up. It's only later on when reading through some news articles I discovered that the websites had been put under so much stress they just wernt coping and gave in - no wonder I couldn't get it on my phone! According to the BBC news page (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7865018.stm) the requests for the national rail page was up 800% compared to a normal Monday morning.

Unfortunatly the snow wasnt down to human error like the google error and cudnt be solved with a few keyboard commands however it does just show how nature can bring not just out road and rail networks to a standstill but always our information networks.