Various Google products, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Calendar are facing global outage. Any service that requires a Google Account to enable features is currently down.

This is a good reason to get away from Google and move to a decentralized libre service such as Nextcloud. Using a libre decentralized platform prevents this kind of outages.

A decentralized service can be down too but unlike Google stuff (and similar products), if an instance goes down, only people on that instance will be affected, not the whole network.

For example, more than 2 billion people use G Suite, which includes Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, Hangouts, etc. and with this outage, all of them are unable to use these products.

But a decentralized service doesn’t affect 2 billion people at once. People use different instances on different servers and many of them can continue using their services.

And also, a decentralized libre service gives you ability to choose the server you want to run the service on, along with the option to use instances running by other people. This way, you can make sure the server won’t surprise you or put you in trouble.