Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi has been anything but peaceful for the search engine giant, Google. Unable to cope with the load of over 500 million Indians simultaneously searching for information about the Indian 2014 Nobel peace prize laureate, Google’s servers crashed on Friday.
“Our servers have never experiences such a spike before,” Larry Page said about the harrowing period. “Initially we thought perhaps some new pics of Katrina or Bipasha had been uploaded and that the spike would come down. But no, search queries only increased, some coming in even from places like Bihar. That’s when we realized we were dealing with a new phenomenon.”
Google engineers scrambled to cope with the load throughout Friday afternoon with the hope that there would be some let up around prime time when Arnab was expected to interview the low profile Satyarthi. Alas, they were mistaken. After a few minutes, Sanjay Jha and Sambit Patra managed to hijack the discussion centered on child labour and steered it towards another BJP vs Congress cockfight, leaving viewers none the wiser about Satyarthi’s life and work of Sathyarthi. The heavy load on Google resumed. Google is now banking on Aamir Khan doing a Satyameva Jayate episode on child labour to reduce pressure on its search engine during the course of the week.
A shaken Larry Page also wants the Indian government to go slow on improving nation-wide broad band connectivity unless the dumbing down of Indian mainstream media is reversed. “Otherwise there will be way too much pressure on us in an environment of information vacuum going forward. We don’t want to end up becoming the butt of jokes like IRCTC,” a despondent Page said.