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).

Re:Details on Google Apps Status Dashboard

[arglebargle_xiv]

Did their certificates expire?

Google.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use google.fr, you insensitive clod!

Re:Google.com?

[Noughmad]

If you use google.fr, that's insensitive Claude for you!

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

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.

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

[yotto]

I'll just search for "site:slashdot.org how do I get to facebook without using google"

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

[captainpanic]

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).

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

[PSVMOrnot]

The trouble is that Google that what you see as Google's services is only the tip of the iceberg. To most people Google is search, Gmail, Youtube, etc. What they don't see is the GoogleAPI javascript stuff they host which is used by hundreds of sites all over the net. Try surfing with noscript for a while and see what effect it would have on you.

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

[jez9999]

Yeah, when Google crashes it's no problem for me; find some other search engines and bing! I'm surfing again in no time.

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.

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

[JustOK]

but how can you find other search engines without googling them?

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.

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

[Nutria]

Firefox's search engine drop-down selector.

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

[JustOK]

yah, I'll google how to use that.

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

[jonbryce]

But if you put your scripts in the same place as the rest of your website, then while the uptime may not be as good, it at least exactly correlates with the uptime of the rest of the site.

Your site will be down if the hosting provider of that site is down, or if the hosting provider of the scripts is down. Having a different hosting provider can only ever mean more potential downtime.

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:40%? No.

[petermgreen]

What is an internet exchange?

It's a place where providers peer when they are not exchanging enough traffic to justify private peering. Exchange point connections are cheap compared to transit but expensive compared to private peering links. Traffic from major access providers to the likes of google is unlikely to go through an internet exchange because with that volume of traffic private peering is more economical.

Which is not to say the 40% figure is true, it's just to say that traffic on an internet exchange is not a reprepsenative sample of internet traffic

Not surprising

[tuo42]

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).

Re:Not surprising

[Tukz]

It's a bit like the early 90's.
I had almost everyone's telephone number memorized, then cellphones got popular and slowly I forgot everyone's telephone number as they were now coded into my cellphone.

I suspect something similar is at play here.
People* don't really remember full urls any more, they just search for the closest and Google sorts the rest.

* When I say people, I mean the general public.

Re:Not surprising

[tuo42]

Don't think so.

Some of them have not only very high scientific degrees, but are also on the board of larger (>600 employees), successful companies.

They might not have the computer knowledge you have, but I wouldn't be so ignorant to call anyone a moron because he is not savvy in one partical field or is simply not interested in becoming more savvy, as the way he operates the internet until know worked for him and he does not have the need or interest to expand his knowledge there.

How many bright people drive cars without even knowing the simplest things about combustion engines and drivetrains? Are they all morons? There, that's our car analogy for this topic.

Re:Not surprising

[Meneth]

Remember when some blogger replaced Facebook as the first search result for "facebook"? He got tons of comments asking why they couldn't log in anymore.

Re:Not surprising

[asylumx]

Everyone who drives should have basic knowledge of how cars work, how to check and add fluids and that there are things called drain plugs for various oils and fluids

Why?

NSA rerouting traffic

[nbritton]

It was just the NSA patching in their new data center...

Google isn't part of the internet anymore

[Arancaytar]

The internet is now part of Google.

Facebook

[tuppe666]

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.

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Probably because they're not fools.

You know who talks about G+? G+ users. That's about it. The value of a social network is based on the number of people involved, and Google failed hardcore at attracting users. Having blown their load, G+ is about as much of a threat to Facebook as MySpace is.

Could've been worse

[Sockatume]

Imagine if the NSA servers went down, nothing would be getting through.

Google+ is growing

[tuppe666]

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.

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:Google+ is growing

[khallow]

Apple's would just be some kind of hybrid prison/sandpit.

But do you get an official Hutt sendoff?

Re:Google+ is growing

[mcvos]

Facebook seems to revolve a lot around resharing vague funny images. G+ is more about real discussion. Resharing images does happen on occasion, but not to the point where it becomes tedious. In the early days of G+, there was such an image listing the most talked about person on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. They were some pop star, some other pop star, and Albert Einstein, respectively.

Call it elitist if you like, but I vastly prefer the topics of discussion on G+ over those on Facebook.

Re:Google+ is growing

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not the result of the social network you use. It is the result of you choosing to only let in your circle people with whom you want a certain kind of conversation.

Not that big of a deal.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

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.

NSA Wiretap installed

[Anonymous Coward]

NSA installed one of it's man.in.the.middle data centers perhaps.

Re:NSA Wiretap installed

[jafiwam]

NSA installed one of it's man.in.the.middle data centers perhaps.

Yup. Microsoft had their man-in-the-middle stuff form the NSA installed last week, causing their outage of cloud and email services.

Either that, or there's a glitch in the Matrix and we'll have to climb down the main wet-wall rather than the fire escape.

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:Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was night everywhere at the same time then that could be a reason for it, yes.

That reminds me

[Mister Liberty]

The past participle of google is googled.
What is the p.p. of bing? bung?

Re:That reminds me

[WhiteEagle1980]

With sing it's sang, so maybe it's bang. "I couldn't google anything on my girlfriend, but I bang her every so often."

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.