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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

If you type in the url wrong, you go somewhere wrong. You also have to get the . and the com right. To top that off, they already need to use a search engine for other things, so by using it for everything they have one less thing to think about. It makes perfect sense. You are like a carpenter wondering why everyone else doesn't have $100k worth of woodworking tools lying around. What if they need a triangle-shaped saw, you ask, what are those fools going to do then? Why won't they invest the time and money into learning the right tool for the job? Because they don't need those specialized tools that you and I use.

Fake numbers

[longk]

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.

Re:Google+ is growing

[mcvos]

As a Google+ user, I definitely don't want Google and Facebook to capture the same market. People are definitely part of the reason why I prefer G+ over Facebook.

Re:So. It has come to this.

[AmiMoJo]

It wasn't 40% of "the internet", it was 40% of internet traffic and the bulk of it would have been YouTube streaming videos. Netflix is also quite a large proportion. No need to panic though, they are just bandwidth heavy protocols, not 40% of every service and website on the internet.