Today started like any other day. I woke up, got dressed and checked my email, except I couldn’t get to my email, Gmail was down.

Over the years I have shifted more and more of my computing power and storage onto the cloud through services like Gmail and Amazon S3. With this shift comes a loss of control. All control was lost today when I couldn’t get to my Gmail account. Gtalk, Googles instant messaging service, was also not working. I work with many remote employees that aren’t physically in our office. My main form of communication with them in Gtalk. With Gmail and Gtalk down, I was really at a loss. It started to make me think “What I would do if I couldn’t use Gmail anymore?”. It was a scary thought. Gmail has a death grip on my digital communication.

After about 2 hours of me mildly freaking out, Gmail and Gtalk came back online and the day was saved. It really made me consider moving back to solutions that I manage, then again that’s very counter to what I am trying to achieve these days…. becoming the ghost in the machine. I’ll save the details of that for another post.