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

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"

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?

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

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

[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.

Google isn't part of the internet anymore

[Arancaytar]

The internet is now part of Google.

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

[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.

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.

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:Google.com?

[Noughmad]

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

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.