Slashdot Mirror
Google Outage: Internet Traffic Plunges 40%
cold fjord writes "Is 40% anything to worry about? Sky News reports, 'Worldwide internet traffic plunged by around 40% as Google services suffered a complete black-out, according to web analytics experts. The tech company said all of its services from Google Search to Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive went down for between one and five minutes last night. The reason for the outage is not yet known, and Google refused to provide any further information when contacted by Sky News Online. According to web analytics firm GoSquared, global internet traffic fell by around 40% during the black-out, reflecting Google's massive grip on the web. "That's huge," said GoSquared developer Simon Tabor. "As internet users, our reliance on Google.com being up is huge."'
See Google Apps Status Dashboard for more details (hover over red outage dots for times).
I use google.fr, you insensitive clod!
Pro Tip: Rather than Googling 'Facebook' you could use a bookmark, or try www.facebook.com
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
I wonder for how many people the internet becomes completely inaccessible without Google? (I also still occasionally meet people who do not know what a 'browser' is, and who think that IE is their only option).
Google is a good search engine, but there are alternatives. If Google stopped working, I wouldn't suffer very much, I think. (When Gmail crashes, I think that for gmail users this is another issue... but I use alternative email).
How much of the plunge was due to lack of search / app availability vs third party pages not loading properly do to analytics and other google dependencies?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This is how the "40%" looked in real life:
http://www.crackajack.de/2013/08/18/google-goes-down-for-2-minutes-fucks-up-100-of-all-journalists/
(Mind the circle in the yellow graphics: It shows the real decline in internet traffic at the German Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), the largest internet exchange point worldwide.)
Further reading: What is DE-CIX? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DE-CIX
I lost count of how many people and customers I know who no longer use the address bar to enter an URL, but Google. Open Browser, Google as start page, enter for example "slashdot.org", click the first hit.
Many of them even access their own company website like this. Or their social networks etc. While I never understood why they do it (or use a browser which actually works this way like Chrome or Safari, where the URL bar also is the search field), this if course means a single point of failure. If they are not able to access google, they don't how to access the website they "search".
And while I am of course not talking about technical adept people, most of them are no morons who are simply not able to comprehend the difference...it's just the way they access the internet...through google (so they think).
Reason for the outage:
NSA has been tinkering with google servers, to milk as much info as possible before more google customer draining happens.
It was just the NSA patching in their new data center...
showed their hand with - "Google refused to provide any further information when contacted by Sky News" - secret court order?
The internet is now part of Google.
HOST SYSTEM NOT RESPONDING, PROBABLY DOWN. DO YOU WANT TO WAIT? (Y/N)
some extra text for the capslock filter... even more text for the filter.
Pro Tip: Rather than Googling 'Facebook' you could use a bookmark, or try www.facebook.com
Facebook is definitely Googles main threat (when will they release their own search engine). Its why Google are throwing everything behind Google+. I have been astonished how Microsoft/Apple have been prepared to squander their respective advantages by not having a social network, preferring to support Facebook against Google.
Didn't notice as, I guess, many of us since we use DuckDuckGo or other sites and don't use Google evil tracking apps either.
Chinese hackers just have to hack Google, and 40% of the internet can be down on demand. The original visionaries at DARPA must be rolling in their grave...
Like a major power transformer failing/catching fire/exploding and causing damage to the primary backup generator.
Failover at that point can take two minutes or more, depending on how many backup generators you have.
If the failure occurred at a primary router junction I can see it taking out the router... and the alternate path discovery taking a few minutes to kick in.
I think the drop was significantly because of Youtube. It was at night, when most people are just relaxing and everybody today watches YT in HD, which is quite a lot of data per second.
Imagine if the NSA servers went down, nothing would be getting through.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Probably because they're not fools.
Except Googe+ is growing, and even though it is in no way eclipsing Facebook. Yahoo was dominant in search; Apple was dominant in smartphones; Hotmail was dominant in internet mail. How is the fact that there is strong player in the market relevant, both Apple and Microsoft could benefit from having their own social network, and Facebook is a threat to both.
How much of this was ads? Youtube? jQuery?
Come on people, this is why you just sync the copy of jquery you have in a cron job, not rely on the third party hosted.
If Google stopped working, I wouldn't suffer very much, I think. (When Gmail crashes, I think that for gmail users this is another issue... but I use alternative email).
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/17/4631622/microsoft-apologies-for-outlook-and-activesync-downtime-says-error Your email could be out three days not one minute.
The short duration exaggerates the issue. If Google were to go away for a day or a week, most everyone would switch to some other service like Bing, etc. But when it goes down for just a few minutes people don't even have time to figure out that google is the problem itself rather than a hiccup in their internet connection. Most people will just hit reload a couple of times, curse, check their phone for text messages and by then everything has recovered and they quickly forget that there even was a problem.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
40% did NOT drop. 40% measured by this one stats agency dropped. They don't measure Bittorrent, Usenet, Netflix or other bandwidth eaters. The real number is likely to be much much lower.
Some people (copyright holder , ISP) pretended bittorent was swamping them with more than 75% traffic being bittorent... But if traffic fell 40% with google outage, and there is anyway other type of traffic, then bittorent cannot be that high in volume.
NSA installed one of it's man.in.the.middle data centers perhaps.
http://www.yandex.com/
The Russian alternative to Google. Could make a good disaster recovery backup, and only the KGB would then have your search results and Yandex.com emails. ;-)
Typing URLs in the search bar works. That's all that matters. The one downside is an extra click, which is obviously bothering GP much more than it is bothering GP's parents: i.e., not at all.
We (as in, we users of the Internet) should not be so reliant on a single entity's web services, just as we (as computer users) are not reliant on a single entity's OS. Guess what, you can participate in a decentralised web search engine right away, with project YaCy, by running a node on your computer(s). There are very few nodes at the moment given the potential, and the search will only get better as more people join.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Occurred during maintenance window. 5 minutes is acceptable. Good job.
..an NSA analyst must have done a wildcard query :)
This is what happens when you type Google into Google... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc - YouTube - IT Crowd)
Chinese hackers just have to hack Google, and 40% of the internet can be down on demand.
RE : http://hilearsivlerim.blogspot.com
Just a note for those who don't mod frequently and might wonder about the actual utility of this post for /.ers.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Something I haven't seen explained in the couple articles I've read on this is why all google services going out would account for 40% of all internet traffic. Am I supposed to believe that at any given moment, 40% of all internet traffic is consumed by gmail, youtube, and web searches? And out of that, how much of the traffic was accounted for by youtube? That is the ONLY seemingly viable element that could really contribute that much, because of the sheer amount of data each transaction with youtube consumes. I mean, doesn't Netflix consume something like 35% of all data traffic at night? So if Netflix went out for five minutes, you could probably say "Netflix outage causes 35% of internet usage to drop" . . .
Rather than telling us how much data usage changed (or if you do, at least break it down for us), isn't a much more relevant statistic one of what percentage page requests/transactions dropped during those two minutes?
It's jumping to irrational conclusions for people to go around saying "oh noes, at least 40% of the internet is dependent on Google to remain up!"
The past participle of google is googled.
What is the p.p. of bing? bung?
... I will post it again. This relates to the page views GoSquared measures, NOT to the entire internet.
GoSquared self-describes as "trusted by 30,000 businesses", which is not a small number, but also doesn't really compare to the number of businesses with websites out there. http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/ says there are about 150 mio domains (in the most popular gTLDs). Assuming domains is a decent measure for websites (which it isn't, but let's go with that for now), at best GoSquared measures 0.02% of the internet.
That means, we only know that 0.02% of 40% was affected, which is some 0.8% of the total internet.
But wait, we're talking page views, not websites. http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ estimates 3.76 billion pages (indexed, not existing). If we assume those 3.76 billion pages are spread evenly across those 150 mio domains, we have some 25 pages per domain.
It now depends on the type of businesses GoSquared represents: are they SMEs (often with no more than 1-5 pages on their domain) or large businesses (often with hundreds of pages)? With 30,000 customers, my guess would be that they represent more SMEs than large businesses, meaning the total number of pages they represent is actually less than 30,000 x 25. Which also means the 0.8% percentage of total page views would drop even further.
Lastly, page views does not mean traffic. Traffic is mostly generated from streaming media these days, not pages.
All the numbers to be taken with a grain of salt, of course, but they still seem to be in a better range than the ones GoSquared published. Never trust statistics you didn't forge yourself.
viable alternatives for nearly every google service exist today, so a 5 minute full-scale service outage is only relevant if you're a manager at google. since the internet is self-healing and completely capable of routing around most damage, google is moreso a clearing house for consumer trust than anything else. 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or more and google would lose customers, which to them is far more important as a publically traded corproration than any web service they offer. googles controversial move of silence after an outage when considered in the context of the corporation as citizen is disconcerting as well. Our friends, as google would like to refer to themselves, wouldnt refuse to confide in us after an outage or problem. If anything it shows a shift from the pre-ipo to post-ipo days has indeed taken hold among other such revelations as the redaction of 20% time. STFU is an Adobe, Apple, or Redmond approach the market tends to regard as acceptabe but one that consumers do not tolerate.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Master Blaster runs Barter Town.
Windows Server 2012 upgrades on all their servers...
What? Windows is so good I am certain that Google runs windows.... The MS guys here cant be lying to me.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If everyone had to go elsewhere for search, could those sites handle the sudden increase in load?
Search is the least of the internet's traffic. Analytics and advertising are working in the back end. YouTube is streamingmassive amounts of data. Google's spiders are crwaling all over. Some small to medium businesses are using Google apps to drive all their comms. Maps are being served the woltd over Goodness knows what else. Remember: Google is out to organize ALL information. Not just your searches.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
Run For Your Life!!!!
It is all in how you pronounce the "b".
It's probably just a buffer overrun on the Prism-Google interface.
Recent?
They've always been an ad company.
it isn't "reliance on Google.com" that causes this. google has insinuated itself into very very many http transactions in such a way that the transactions do not complete if google is offline.
Earlier Slashdot posted that Netflix accounts for 1/3 of all bandwith on the internet. So if Google had owned Netlix, does that mean only about 27% of internet activity would've remained? Or are we talking about page views alone with the Google outage?
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of people were suddenly cut of from searching for porn. I fear something terrible has happened,
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Yahoo was dominant in email. Yahoo is still dominant in email. Despite all the press gmail and outlook get, Yahoo his still the biggest email service in the US.
Yahoo! Mail had 281 million (December 2012) while 420 million (18 February 2013) and gmail 425 million (June 2012. Those are the figures from wikipedia which place Yahoo! a behind the main players. The figures are worldwide. I am not sure why I should care about US only figures...its a small market, or why the results should be vastly different.
Someone @ Google was testing Zmap. Found it lacking :)
During that time my browsing was bliss, fast fast fast, then it slowed down when Google started working again. Google is bad for the Internet, bad for the world and bad for you and I.
The NSA asked for a full data dump. Google, the good citizen that it is, promptly dumped all data to the NSA channel. They won't talk about it because they are prevented from doing so by the 'communist act' (originally labeled the 'patriot act', a misnomer if there ever was one...)
Did Bing or YahooBing see an increase in traffic when google went down? If yes, how much? Will anyone who used Bing when Google went down think of sticking with Bing or atlease use Bing occasionally?
That's why I use startpage.
So all datacenters, everywhere, went down at the same time with no failover and no recovery plan? Even Netflix does better than that.
There is a inside convert operation going on between Google and the Obama administration.
> Search to Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive went down for between one and five minutes last night
In 1993 most people did not know what the internet was. Now one prominent search engine goes down for a few minutes, and it is considered news worthy.
Maybe people should learn from the experience and stop "over-logging on", because they may be unprepared as a result if the Internet is lost permanently. We need to stop browsing pointlessly, to only use it when truly necessary and to only view porn twice a day... max.
MicroSoft outlook.com was down much of last Wednesday. Netflix fails periodically too.
Doesnt really matter what the causes are- power failure, hardware, software, or black-hacking. Uptime seems tobe the weekest part of these super clouds.
I'd probably be more bothered by Google Drive going down than Google Search.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Youtube and Hulu are the only places where i can watch some old cartoons. Hollywood hasn't released some old cartoons form the 1980s and 1990s onto DVD yet.
I'm surprised the NSA doesn't have a search page up by now.
Have gnu, will travel.
I would guess the most likely causes of the decrease in traffic are 1) the sheer amount of data transferred by Youtube and 2) if ALL Google services went down, that probably included their DNS servers, which are used by countless organizations. In those cases, Google going down would effectively take down the entire internet for them.
sounds like the zone file for google.com broke, or some other DNS-related outage.
So how much of the traffic drop was actually due to users versus the amount of traffic Google
generates with their tracking information retrieval?
A very close friend who is an analog vintage circuitry systems genious has never been to Wal-mart for any reason and is so proud of that fact.. and while I'm on this tout, I will proudly exclaim, I have never googled anything except on my friend's computer, he swears by it!
They booted their servers from a re-used AOL floppy, so no wonder they had problems. Same thing happened at Three Mile Island.
That's a monopoly.
Shit happens, details at 6
Jack of all trades,master of none
That's when they patched in the NSA's new tap.
that's it.
This seems very much like a core psy vs spy configuration change
You just made me think of the characters from a Mad comic strip doing Gangnam Style.
Without Google search I am stuck only using the websites that I use everyday, facebook/slachdot.
Am I limited when Google goes down? Fuck fuck no. All I really lose is YouTube.
whois.sc says there are about 150 mio domains
Why would grown-up Kool-Aid need 150 domains?
More seriously, how did "mio" come to be an abbreviation for "million"?
I live in South Africa. Our main bottleneck is international bandwidth
Now I understand. Thank you for explaining. Next time we discuss this, "South Africa is like Australia or New Zealand used to be" might help others understand your edge case quicker.
Is there anything Google does not do? HAndles your email, searches the web for you,stores your files searches your desktop, and displays all the "Free news videos" on YT.. you know, all the videos slamming global monoliths that handle your email, search the web for you, store your files searches your desktop, and displays all the "Freedom news videos" I expect that before Google starts mowing my lawn with driverless mowers, cutting my hair with mindless hairstylists (oh we already have those) and doing my job for me so I can just go home and surf the net wnd watch videos (courtesy of Google) they may have to get rid of all those pesky anti-monopoly videos..
Could it be a test for the big unexpected solar flare they're expecting the second week in October?
Has Google crossed the threshold where the government(s) need to either break it up or impose extraordinary controls? That is the theory behind trust-busting and the attempts to keep banks from growing too large, because if they fail, they can take the economy with them. Grow too big to fail, and suddenly you can no longer operate as if you are in a free market environment.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Brings to mind Johnny from the first "Airplane" as he plugs back in the runway approach lights..."juuust kidding!"
There are much safer alternatives than Google.
I use none of these sites and wouldn't miss them.