I do the same as well, Google is always up no matter what, except for some maintenance I guess at the lowest traffic level times.
Hmm I don't think google could possible get hacked because they have hundreds of different back ups for everything. But I might be wrong
may be in some parts of the world it wasn't. I remember a few years back, when google.com was redirecting to another low class search engine for a while.
it happen with me for whole day but on the next report in media appeared and our ISP was forced to enable google.com . I think my ISP just banned all google site making diffcult for people to use it. Currently everything fine.