How to survive the next Google outage

Millions of users worldwide were left stranded and confused when their daily used Google apps and services stopped working suddenly. While Google has experienced outages of one or the other service now and again, this was one of those rare times when most of its services were out of commission simultaneously. Here is a quick guide on how to survive a Google outage for any of its services

Mail - Gmail is one of the biggest email service providers in the world. So an outage of Gmail could leave you in a problem if you need to access your old emails. The solution to this is to use Gmail with an email client on your computer that downloads and saves emails for offline access, such as the mail app on Macs and Windows computers. You can also use Gmail's offline option, which lets you choose how many days of messages you want to sync from settings. Alternatively, it's best to have additional email addresses from multiple providers such as Microsoft, Yahoo or Zoho.

Videos - YouTube is the biggest video-viewing portal globally and gets over 2 billion users a month. But in case YouTube has an outage, that does not mean you cannot enjoy watching videos anymore. Various alternative video sharing platforms are available today, such as Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metacafe and DTube. In case you prefer short-form videos, you can switch to IGTV, Reels, Chingari or Roposo for content.

Maps - Are you one of those dependent on Google Maps to go from one point to the other? You should consider what you would do if Maps stopped working just before you have to head to an urgent event. We recommend that you download and install at least one alternative option as a backup to use for the commute. MapMyIndia offers excellent maps for India, detailed down to house number search, and it works great. You can also install the Waze app, which provides a couple of features that even Google Maps does not offer and use that instead of Google Maps.

Search - We have been so spoilt for search by Google that majority of the users say the term 'Google it' instead of saying search when looking for something on the internet. However, Google is not the only search engine available that you need to rely on entirely. There are many alternative search engines available such as Bing and Yahoo, along with a few search engines that have a stronger focus on user privacy, such as DuckDuckGo and Startpage. You never know; you might completely switch over to one of these alternatives.

Docs – Google Docs offers a robust online office suite used for personal and professional users worldwide. If you prefer to work on an office suite available on the web, you should know several alternatives that should be considered. The most prominent option is from Microsoft – it offers a free web version for all of its office apps that can be accessed by signing into Office.com. Apart from Microsoft, you can also look at Zoho Docs that offers a suite of handy features in its online suite.