As of today, December 2024, Internet users cannot get the current USD to BRL currency conversion from the Google Finance service.
The Brazilian authorities prohibited the company to make the information available after it started to present a different value than the one traded in the local stock market.
Several sources in the X.com network claim that Brazil now has 3 different currency prices against the US Dollar:
- Official: traded in the stock market and used by banks in FOREX transactions;
- Tourism: practiced between international travelers and touristic agencies;
- “Google’s”: value displayed in the company’s Finance website, which is product of an algorithm that takes information from multiple sources around the world and process it.
The practical consequences of this measure are still unknown, but we can imagine various services being disrupted by the inability to connect to Google Finance’s service to obtain such an important trade value as the USD:BRL price.
I am personally affected by this as my Google Sheets have functions that get trade prices directly from Google Finance and are used in many calculations.
This episode is a good reminder of an important concept from the integrated systems realm: beware of single points of failure. Online services that rely on integrations with Google on the assumption that the tech giant is immutable or not subject to sudden changes should consider contingencies and “what if” scenarios like when dealing with smaller vendors.