Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Google"s 5 minutes outage drops internet usage by 40 percent

Google’s 5 minutes outage drops internet usage by 40 percent


It has being confirmed that all Google services went down on Friday evening. Old news, you may say. But that small act, where all of its services–that’s YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, Google Drive–were unreachable for a few minutes, cut Internet traffic by 40%. That is an amazing figure. No one outside the company is quite sure what happened as yet, services in most of Google products went down briefly during the blackout that evening, leaving users in the dark and without access to what they wanted to do.


Google


Screenshot of Google’s Apps Dashboard shows its red-light status above.


Analytics company called Go-Squared watched the dip happen in real time on Friday as it monitored more than 30,000 customer websites for traffic data. The trouble started at around 23:52, and it took just one minute for inbound page views to stall. According to Twitter, there was a sudden and very drastic spike in the volume of tweets during those five minutes. Digital expert Phil Dearson, Head of Strategy for integrated marketing agency Tribal Worldwide, said the disruption cost Google an estimated US$500,000 in the few minutes that it was down, equivalent to about five of chief executive Larry Page’s Tesla electric car, or about 363 Google Glass units, surely now that must hurt.


A 40% drop is enough to send chills down the spines of the people who pay the bills, but thankfully this was a very ephemeral drop. It was business as usual but a few minutes later, the Google train was happily dropping off search passengers once again. However, the plunge in internet traffic also shows the strength of Google as a primary internet source and the unpopularity of its competitors such as Bing, which were unable to pick up the slack during the outage. It’s insane just how much we take Google for granted every day, but we sure do miss it when it’s gone.



Google"s 5 minutes outage drops internet usage by 40 percent

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