For a few minutes Google suffered an outage, which affected its suite of services and killed 40 percent of the global online traffic.
On Friday, Aug. 16, Google blacked out for few minutes, which affected the number of page views and caused a 40 percent drop in global Internet traffic (during a five-minute window).
The Google outage began around 4:37 PM Pacific Time (PT) and lasted between one and five minutes. The blackout affected all Google services, including Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive etc. However, the services were soon up and running as before.
"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," reports GoSquared, a real time analytics company.
While an outage may not seem like a major thing as technical difficulties are often experienced by websites, where Google is concerned it is a big deal owing to its services' reach. For those brief few minutes, Google's outage ended up rendering a whopping 40 percent of the global Internet traffic devoid of any service.
"That's huge," said GoSquared developer Simon Tabor. "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."
The blackout brings to light Google's omnipresence and how far and wide its reach is. On the flip side, the outage allowed rivals like Yahoo and Bing to benefit as users sought alternatives to Google Search. The Google outage brings to the fore how dependant netizens have become on the search giant. If in a few minutes of outage it could take down 40 percent of the traffic, it is unimaginable what effect an entire day of blackout could potentially have!
At this juncture it is not known what caused the outage. "Google has acknowledged the outage, which it says has been resolved," reports CNET, but there's no official explanation from the company yet.
With Google's services resuming as normal post the outage, billions of netizens have got access to their Gmail, YouTube, Google+ or any other Google services used back.
