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."'

Comments

Details on Google Apps Status Dashboard

[Novus]

See Google Apps Status Dashboard for more details (hover over red outage dots for times).

As I keep having to say to my older family..

[sjwt]

Pro Tip: Rather than Googling 'Facebook' you could use a bookmark, or try www.facebook.com

Cause

[DarkOx]

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?

Re:Cause

[tommeke100]

I'd say 99% AdSense not responding, analytics not responding, social media buttons not responding....there goes your website ;-)

40%? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine?

[Richard_at_work]

GoogleAPI gives you the ability to choose an exact version of the script, and maintains that as a permalink, so when the next version becomes available your code isn't broken.

The advantage of using GoogleAPI far outweighs your perceived negatives - Google has a far better uptime and availability than any other free host, they often place the most frequently used scripts into the Google search homepage using the same link as you would, so stuff like jQuery et al are already cached by a high percentage of your visitors, and it goes someway to cut down a small percentage of my traffic, especially if I maintain multiple sites or subdomains that use the same scripts.

Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine?

[jkflying]

I had an issue where my ISP's homepage used google scripts, so when I was capped (yes, that happens here, we pay ~$2/GB) their page wouldn't load completely and I couldn't top up my account, even though they allowed requests to their page while capped.

Actually, Tragically Funny == Informative

[Overzeetop]

Just a note for those who don't mod frequently and might wonder about the actual utility of this post for /.ers.

Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine?

[mcvos]

The fact that a minute downtime is big news is definitely saying something. Both about the reliability of Google's servers, and the impact of their products.