The Sky Is Falling! Google Goes Down for 5 Minutes, Web Traffic Drops 40%

You might not have noticed because you might have a life. On a Friday night in August you might have been out drinking with friends, or at a movie, or driving to the beach or, depending where in the world you are, you might even have been asleep. So you might have missed the fact that Google went dark for five whole minutes. As a result, worldwide web traffic dropped 40 percent.

Are we dependent much? Ya think?

The interesting thing is not that Google went down: technology is notoriously complicated and glitchy; it's amazing how well it works most of the time and stuff happens, right? But what is worthy of note is how dependent we are on Google. All of us. Everywhere. There was a time when governments would not have permitted that sort of monopolistic concentration of power. Entire agencies of government in the US and Europe were set up, staffed and funded to prevent it. But that was before shareholder rights became a religious doctrine and government became the enemy.

We suspect that military strategists responsible for our security noticed this. How do you protect a financial system, most of whose transactions are bits and bytes happening electronically, online? And who is responsible for a global communications system that everyone uses but no one 'owns' in the traditional sense? Well, Google does seem to have a sense of obligation and they did fix it. But our guess is that terrorists, cranks and apocalyptic visionaries the world over took note of that dependence. And are maybe thinking that could be an interesting target whenever they feel the desire to raise their profile or make a point.

Maybe the rest of us should also be giving some thought to the dependencies we have created for ourselves without realizing it. And maybe we should even be thinking about doing something about it. One of these days. JL

Joe Svetlik reports in CNet:

Google suffered an outage late on Friday night, though you might not have noticed -- it only went down for five minutes. During that brief window, Internet traffic around the world dropped by a massive 40 per cent, according to Web analytics firm GoSquared, Sky News Online reports.
All Google's services were unavailable for those five minutes, including Google Search, YouTube, and Google Drive.
Commenting on the 40 per cent drop in Web traffic, GoSquared developer Simon Tabor said, "That's huge. As Internet users, our reliance on Google.com being up is huge."
Google's Apps Dashboard showed all its services were hit by the outage. But the company wouldn't be drawn on what caused it.
"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users," a note on the Apps Dashboard read. "The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour."
A later message read: "Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50 per cent to 70 per cent of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after four minutes." (That would've been just before midnight Friday night UK time.)
When contacted by Sky News Online, a Google spokesperson said they had no comment beyond the Dashboard message.
Phil Dearson, head of strategy for ad agency Tribal Worldwide, estimated the blackout had cost Google around £330,000. He said it was a "massive surprise" for all of Google's services to go down at once.
But it's not the first time it's happened. Google suffered a similar blackout in 2009. And just a few months ago, Google Drive went down.
Still, that 40 per cent stat is a bit alarming. Are we too reliant on Google now?