Google Goes Down For 5 Minutes, Internet Traffic Drops 40%

Google.com hasn’t properly gone down or offline since 2009. However, on August 16th between 22:52 and 22:57 GMT Google was down, yes Google was down for 5 straight minutes – just how did people survive? Well apparently not very well at all because Global Internet Traffic plummeted 40% during that period of time. This dip in traffic measured by GoSquare showed that Global Page Views in that period fell 40% compared to before the outage.

The outage affected Google.com and related services like Gmail but static services like YouTube were not affected and users of YouTube would of had no problem searching through and browsing content. It just goes to show how dependent the world’s internet really is on Google, imagine a Google outage for a whole day? Many websites and businesses would simply be crippled by a total lack of traffic and it would cost internet related businesses dearly.

Here’s to hoping that the next Google outage is a long time away and will only be as trivial as this one. Did you notice Google was down for that five minute period?!

Image courtesy of Google