Cape Town - Imagine this scenario. You urgently need to search something but Google is having an outage and you need to look up the information as in yesterday.
For many South Africans and users around the world, this was reality. Thousands of users were unable to access Google services including search, Maps, YouTube, and Gmail on Wednesday night.
According to Downdetector.co.za, the problems were first reported at 19:21 and persisted until as late as 11pm.
Another Downtime tracker outage.report, indicated that other African countries were hit by the outage, namely Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria.
The problems seem to have been resolved.
We list alternatives in the event that you need to desperately search for information during an outage.
Bing is probably one of the most popular alternative search engines and boasts impressive features as well as user experience.
A lesser-known but still a good option is SwissCows. It is a zero-tracking private search engine based in Switzerland. SwissCows is hosted on secure Swiss infrastructure.
Speaking of privacy, DuckDuckGo does not collect or store any of your personal information and can be your go-to if you want to keep browsing habits and personal data private.
Alternatives for Gmail include Switzerland-based ProtonMail, Belgium-based Mailfence, Germany-based Tutanota, Mailbox.org and Norway-based Runbox.
Google Chrome alternatives include Firefox browser, Iridium (based on open source Chromium), Tor browser and Ungoogled Chromium.
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