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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
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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...
The internet is now part of Google.
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.
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...
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.
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.
NSA installed one of it's man.in.the.middle data centers perhaps.
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 ?
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?
If it was night everywhere at the same time then that could be a reason for it, yes.
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.
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
It's probably just a buffer overrun on the Prism-Google interface.