Search Overload
The death of “The King of POP” though very much a surprise to the whole world, it again tests the internet to the limit causing Google to crash and prevent the biggest search site from returning results regarding Michael Jackson for about an hour. This is the main problem with the internet, the total unpredictability of the whole system which is made of several thousand or so individual components that have to work together to give you in a mere milliseconds the search results you expect. Google is known to be the largest or one of the firms with the most extensive data centers the world over that has remained secret as to location and many other details.
These data centers are high tech server banks that contain thousands upon thousands of enterprise grade servers with multiple processors and terabytes of ram, serving the internet and allowing the millions if not billions of people who conduct searches each and every minute of the day. Now with all that computing power, you still get hitches and yes it is part of technology as it breaks down and can get overwhelmed by the unpredictable human nature. The human factor is still the biggest question in any technology for we design, use it and break the darned things better than any engineer can engineer it. There is no bullet-proof or human-proof technology on earth that can take on human nature and that is what scares people about Cloud Computing and other technological advances.
The most damaging problems we have experienced over these past few years over the internet all have to do with human beings and their actions. They have cost billions of dollars in economic damages yet we still cannot do away with the weak link of the computing industry, HUMANS!