Google goes down for five minutes on Friday night, global internet traffic drops 40%: report - NY Daily News
ANDREW KELLY/REUTERS
Google went black for five minutes on Friday night, causing panic on Twitter and massive dips in internet traffic.
The world almost ended on Friday night.
At least one would surmise that from the panicked messages on Twitter saying that Google, along with several of its wildly-popular services like YouTube and Gmail, were all down.
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And reports show that the internet search giant did have issues Friday accounting for up to a 40% drop in global web traffic from 11:52pm to 11:57pm British Summer Time.
Web analytics company GoSquared showed a massive dip in internet traffic during the brief blackout as users struggled to find what it was they were looking for on the worldwide web.
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GoSquared developer Simon Tabor told Sky News that the blackout was "huge."
"As internet users, our reliance on Google.com being up is huge."
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The company did not immediately return the Daily News' request for comment. In fact, Google's only conspicuous acknowledgement to the blackout lies in its Apps Status Dashboard, showing everything from Gmail to Google Drive and everything in between being down on Aug. 16.
When Google when down, the tweets went up.
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According to Topsy analytics, tweets per minute skyrocketed around the point that Google went black, from an average of 200 tweets per minute about Google to more than 1,000.
"For five freakin' minutes!" one Twitter user complained. Another wrote, "Google was down for five minutes… Is it a sign that the END OF THE WORLD has started?"
It is unclear how much revenue was lost by the short-lived but intense outage, though some experts are putting it in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This isn't the first time Google has gone dark. The services went down in May 2009 and was later blamed on a massive server failure.