What if Google was down for a minute? What do you think will happen?
Well, it happened yesterday; precisely between 15:51 & 15:52 PDT (22.51 & 22.52 GMT) on the 16th of August.
The California-based search giant said all of its services from Google Search to Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive went down for between one and five minutes last night but it refused to elaborate on the reasons why.
A message on the Google Apps Dashboard showed 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.
A later message said: ‘Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50% to 70% of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after four minutes.’
According to web analytics firm GoSquared, global internet traffic fell by around 40% during the black-out, reflecting Google’s massive grip on the web.
If global traffic fell by around 40%, I wonder what will happen if the Internet is down for a minute….Chaos?
