When there is a bad storm, and or when my area has lots of congestion it seems google owned sites stay fast.
short version is, they spend a lot of money on distributed fault-tolerant infrastructure
they have a lot of datacenters with replicated services, which means you don't notice traffic jams and outages as much
your ISP probably has a google install at their datacenter, they partner with ISPs for this exact purpose
This is the same reason why ads will load up super fast on Youtube but the main video might be really slow. Advertisements are stored closer to you, while smaller videos might only exist on one server across the country.
The term for this is colocation where multiple companies’ servers are co-located at data centers. The space is leased out by the carrier and allows for better performance and resilience during outages.
Another related term is edge computing which shares the distributed (as opposed to centralized) topology.
