If someone went to war with the US and nuked Google first, I think we'd fly into all kinds of panic.
The title is a bit misleading - it's not in one physical place, it's in one code repository. Considering Google offices are in major earthquake territory I'd hope they are pretty decentralized.According to Potvin, the system spans 10 different Google data centers.
I'm really curious about this. So a lot of people have android phones. If Google went down and your phone couldn't authenticate with Google sign in, I think most people would lose the ability to log into their phone. You could still use the phone without an account, but you would lose your phone book and message history. This isn't a big deal to you without a Google phone, but friends and family who do would be cut off from their devices. Also, more and more business and personal emails are gmail, so those would be right out and I guarantee some company that you work with relies heavily on google apps and a google failure would be catastrophic. There's the entire elderly generation who think Google is the internet, so I wonder what they would do if it blipped off the map. There's also the sites that use Google as their search. I wonder how much Google going offline would affect you, even if you don't use Google services yourself.