Google outage reportedly caused big drop in global traffic

[Ambrocious]

Most Google services, including search, were down for a few minutes Friday, prompting much of the Internet to start the weekend early...and then quickly change its mind.

by Eric Mack

August 16, 2013 6:06 PM PDT

(Credit: CNET)

For a very brief few minutes on Friday you may have noticed some Google services, most notably search, appeared to be down. If not, maybe you noticed the ensuing freak-out across Twitter and the rest of the Internet.

At first glance the flash outage was little more than an opportunity for a few good one-liners and a chance to actually stand up from the keyboard and walk around for a few minutes. If we had connected nanobots floating around in our bloodstreams, certainly they would have registered a worldwide uptick in caffeine intake during those few moments.

As it turns out though, Google's downtime did appear to have global, measurable repercussions, according to analytics firm GoSquared, which estimates that it caused a 40 percent drop in global traffic during a five-minute window:

Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 BST on 16th August 2013. This had a huge effect in the number of pageviews coming into GoSquared's real-time tracking - around a 40% drop, as this graph of our global pageviews per minute shows. That's huge. As internet users, our reliance on google.com being up is huge. It's also of note that pageviews spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their destination.

(Credit: GoSquared)

Google has acknowledged the outage, which it says has been resolved. The official downtime according to a Google status page was between 1 and 5 minutes.

In related news, Bing and Yahoo still exist, but apparently failed to find a way to target their marketing to Google users during the outage.

SOURCE: CNET

[irefay]

"Eggs all in one basket?" - Yep Probably.

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I am betting the outage was caused by someone accidentally unplugging the NSA doggle from the Google master server. lol

Edited August 18, 2013 by irefay

[Teemo]

I missed this, because I didn't surf the internet on Friday. :rolleyes:

[Ambrocious]

Fun Fact: The same source that the C.I.A. is funded with ALSO funds Google. The name of that funding organization is In-Q-Tel.

[MidnightDistortions]

I wasn't using Google at this time, but usually when there is a big outage like Google, there is a reduced traffic flow.. lol especially when a panic attack ensues "Google is down! Google is down!! We're doomed, the ship is sinking! Save us from boredom!"