Google goes down for five minutes, web traffic plunges 40 percent - Inquirer

GLOBAL INTERNET TRAFFIC dipped by 40 percent over the weekend when Google experienced a complete blackout, web analytics firms have claimed. All of Google's services including Search, Gmail and Youtube went down briefly during the blackout on Friday evening, leaving users in the dark and unable to access them for what the firm's Apps Status Dashboard claimed was between one and five minutes. A message on the Google Apps Dashboard at the time said that all of its services were hit. "We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour," it said. Another message appeared later, which read, "Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50 to 70 percent of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after four minutes." Although the internet giant was down for less than five minutes, it seems that the internet as a whole suffered greatly as a result. "This had a huge effect in the number of pageviews coming into [our] real-time tracking - around a 40 percent drop, as this graph of our global pageviews per minute shows," web analytics firm Gosquared said. "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 hasn't responded to our request for comment regarding why the outage occurred, but it's suspected that it cost the internet services firm a fair amount of money. The plunge in internet traffic also perhaps shows the unpopularity of Google's competitors such as Bing, which were unable to pick up the slack during the outage. µ via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEUiD7OaBY5ps88aU8IO6sWbu268Q&url=http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2289637/google-goes-down-for-five-minutes-web-traffic-plunges-40-percent

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