Early last Saturday, the unthinkable happened- Google, and all its services like Gmail and YouTube, went dark for a duration that spanned a single minute to five minutes starting from 4:22 AM to 4:27 AM. As a result, global Internet traffic crashed by 40% as users couldn’t access any of the dozens of hugely popular services that the search giant runs. The number-crunching was done by GoSquared, a Web analytics company who also noticed that global Web traffic spiked once Google was back up and running,.
This number (scarily) proves how intensely everyone relies on Google. In spite of the clear effects that its health has on the global Internet, Google has refused to divulge any details about why the blackout happened, responding merely with a statement that said, “Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50 percent to 70 percent of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after 4 minutes.”
GoSquared graph showing the fall and spike in global Internet traffic because of the Google blackout.
While a Google services outage has happened before, it’s not exactly a common occurrence. Back in May, Indian users reported that they were unable to access Gmail and some other Google services. Similarly, last year in July, Google Talk (now known as Hangouts) went down for over an hour.