Google outage reportedly caused big drop in global
traffic
Most Google services, including search, were down for a
few minutes Friday, prompting much of the Internet to start the weekend
early...and then quickly change its mind.
Eric Mack by Eric Mack
August 16, 2013 6:06 PM PDT
For a very brief few minutes on Friday you may have
noticed some Google services, most notably search, appeared to be down. If not,
maybe you noticed the ensuing freak-out across Twitter and the rest of the
Internet.
At first glance the flash outage was little more than an
opportunity for a few good one-liners and a chance to actually stand up from
the keyboard and walk around for a few minutes. If we had connected nanobots
floating around in our bloodstreams, certainly they would have registered a
worldwide uptick in caffeine intake during those few moments.
As it turns out though, Google's downtime did appear to
have global, measurable repercussions, according to analytics firm GoSquared,
which estimates that it caused a 40 percent drop in global traffic during a
five-minute window:
Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and
23:57 BST on 16th August 2013. This had a huge effect in the number of
pageviews coming into GoSquared's real-time tracking - around a 40% drop, as
this graph of our global pageviews per minute shows. That's huge. As internet
users, our reliance on google.com being up is huge. It's also of note that
pageviews spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their
destination.
Google has acknowledged the outage, which it says has
been resolved. The official downtime according to a Google status page was
between 1 and 5 minutes.
In related news, Bing and Yahoo still exist, but
apparently failed to find a way to target their marketing to Google users
during the outage.
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