More accurately, Google went down for many users today, with a total failure of the Google search, Gmail, Reader, Docs, and Youtube. Most of these outages occurred because of a problem with anything touching AT&T’s network.

In order to communicate during the outage, journalists and bloggers covering the story flocked to Twitter. Ironic, if you’re familiar with Twitter’s history of outages.

I could go into a bit of a spiel about how cloud computing isn’t always the solution, or talk a little bit about the need to monitor and measure service providers to make sure that they’re keeping up with their SLAs, but I think it’s more important to understand what the hell just happened in a very important context.

Anyone who used Google Apps for work and was affected couldn’t get work done this morning. Anyone trying to search for information had other options, but the verb is “Googling” not “Livesearching” or “Yahooing.” And importantly, Web sites that used Google Analytics would be hard or impossible to access as the site would continually try to load information that was simply nowhere to be found.

Indeed, if Yahoo or even Microsoft had gone down, would it even have been newsworthy? But for many, Google is the Internet; or at least such a big part of the Internet that it’s hard to think of an Internet without Google.

This got me thinking about some other news that I had read recently about how the Obama administration is removing limitations imposed by his predecessor on prosecuting anti-trust violations; what surprised me was that among possible targets of investigation were not only the banks that were “Too big to fail” but Google as well.

I guess Google’s “too big to fail” as well. Sometimes, it does seem that the whole world is running on the back of one, very big, very powerful computer somewhere in a supply closet in Mountain View.