Massive World Internet Outage Hits Six Rivers

The world wide web was thrown for a loop early this morning when some of the world’s largest internet players suddenly were not available.

YouTube, Google, and thousands of other internet stalwarts were offline when the world’s largest data centre went dark.

The failure at OVH.com, a French cloud computing company, was one of the largest outages since the internet began.

The first rumblings came when YouTube simply was not available. A whole host of Google services, including Gmail, were also affected, especially many of the tools currently used in education where so many students are currently working from home in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

A lesser known radio streaming service was also affected, shutting down thousands of internet radio stations around the globe, including Six Rivers Radio in Pugwash.

Station operator Bill Martin said, “We were all in the dark. It just stopped and our supplier’s website was also out of service so we could not get any explanation of the problem.”

With over 300 thousand servers, OVH is the largest server company in Europe and the third largest in the world. An outage of that size is felt across the globe.

The services were restored slowly, in increments. You Tube and Google were out for a few hours. The world network of radio stations did not get back on air till late afternoon.

One internet user said, “We tend to forget how dependent we have become on the internet. Like the old song says, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

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