Google Outage Halts 40 Percent of Internet Traffic

[StewShearerOld]

Google Outage Halts 40 Percent of Internet Traffic

A brief lapse in Google's service left crippled worldwide traffic.

Google is pretty big. In fact, in terms of the internet as a whole Google is pretty well Kaiju-sized. So large is the internet titan that when it went down for mere minutes on Friday, a whopping 40 percent of worldwide traffic went down with it. The Google outage began at 4:37 Pacific Time and, by most estimates, lasted anywhere from one to five minutes. During that brief period countless service under the Google umbrella were unavailable. This would include, of course, things like YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive and even the Google search engine, among many others.

Currently, there's no explanation for what happened to bring Google down, but the consequences of its collapse, even temporary, are somewhat startling when you consider the sheer breadth of it and the possibility of it someday happening again. After all, yesterday's outage was, by most accounts, only a few minutes long. What would happen if it were an hour? Or a day? Even just personally, when I consider everything I have wrapped up in Google, the thought of it all suddenly not being there for my easy access makes me sweat a bit.

But then that's also arguably one of the risks we take with the further digitization of our world. It may be more convenient to be able to access something with the push of a button, but at the end of the day technology can fail and systems can crash. Convenience comes with a cost, and for two minutes yesterday the world got a brief glimpse into what the cost of Google could potentially be.

Source: The Register


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[Dark Knifer]

I wonder if this cost a lot of money for many people.

Either way its pretty scary how much of the internet google has >.>

 

[shirkbot]

Google may well be the internet's 10 ton gorilla, but even if it goes down there are alternatives. I do think though that this should serve as a notice to all parties that it may require some breaking down, or at least decentralizing.

 

[NLS]

But the question is: What ACTUALLY went down in those few minutes? Did they actiavate SKYNET as a part of the Google central core? Did they patch in a way to implement even bigger and broader surveillance? SO many questions left unanswered...

 

[masticina]

Dependancy is like a drug isn't it. Google is awesome but what if something goes wrong? How will the google addicted people react?

Of course it was a moment when NSA finally had time to catch up on what they we're spying on. So NSA was happy with the down time. Hell maybe we see more google downtime because the NSA is kinda swamped. Just saying.

 

[New Troll]

Google had a hiccup and 40% of the internet users still wouldn't use anything else and decided to just wait it out instead. That's quite impressive!

 

[CrystalShadow]

Google may well be the internet's 10 ton gorilla, but even if it goes down there are alternatives. I do think though that this should serve as a notice to all parties that it may require some breaking down, or at least decentralizing.

Well... It raises questions about how the service functions exactly.

For instance, if I were to ping the IP address of google right now, chances are I'd get a very different result to you. (I don't know that for a fact of course, because I don't know where in the world you live, but still...)

Because google's url is actually a multicast address that redirects traffic to the nearest servers.

And google has servers all over the world...

Google is highly decentralised in many ways, but clearly, there must be some kind of flaw in their systems for it to be possible to cripple so much of it.

Incedentally, around the time this problem is said to have happened, I could get to google services, but not hotmail... Was it just google that failed, or was this more extensive?

 

[rapidoud]

Because Escapist isn't known for offering insight, when this was posted on reddit lots of rational minds came up with the conclusion that it only dropped 40% simply because it was a temporary outage.

You give people a 5 hour downtime and most people have moved off to alternative search engines. All it really shows is how much data traffic is for people searching for websites (most of the time because they don't remember the specific name and it's too complex for the searcher to remember the beginning of the name).

 

[mad825]

-Duckduckgo
-Yahoo
-Bing

Just few of many....You add ".com" if you're new to the internetz....Welcome to the world of scummy people!

Hey, at least during this time they wouldn't have been tracking me.

 

[Rainforce]

Because Escapist isn't known for offering insight, when this was posted on reddit lots of rational minds came up with the conclusion that it only dropped 40% simply because it was a temporary outage.

You give people a 5 hour downtime and most people have moved off to alternative search engines. All it really shows is how much data traffic is for people searching for websites (most of the time because they don't remember the specific name and it's too complex for the searcher to remember the beginning of the name).

That explanation is waaaaay too undramatic to be true.

Also I didn't even notice shows how little I use google these days.

 

[SanguiniusMagnificum]

I think that I'll just leave this here... it feels very appropriate, especially if you replace the word "internet" with "google".

 

[Scars Unseen]

"I can't get to Google. Quick! Someone do a search of 'Google search alternative'...
..
...
...crap."

 

[Makabriel]

Google isn't just a search engine..

 

[Hagi]

Because Escapist isn't known for offering insight, when this was posted on reddit lots of rational minds came up with the conclusion that it only dropped 40% simply because it was a temporary outage.

You give people a 5 hour downtime and most people have moved off to alternative search engines. All it really shows is how much data traffic is for people searching for websites (most of the time because they don't remember the specific name and it's too complex for the searcher to remember the beginning of the name).

That explanation is waaaaay too undramatic to be true.

Also I didn't even notice shows how little I use google these days.

It's even worse.

Some part of that 40% will have come from ads served by Google as well as embedded YouTube clips not being loaded where they otherwise would. The website itself those are embedded in would still have loaded perfectly fine, it just wouldn't have shown any ads or embedded videos.

Considering just how widespread Google's ad program is and how big YouTube videos are ( in comparison to everything else your browser is loading ) this could easily account for a decent part of the drop.

In addition to that Google isn't just receiving requests, it's sending out tons as well. It's search engine has countless bots constantly roaming the internet to index every website they can find to keep search results up-to-date. All those would've stopped with this outage as well.

That's not to say that this isn't a staggeringly high number, but it's not quite the same as 40% of all internet traffic being direct at "google.com" or "youtube.com".

 

[Something Amyss]

Google is pretty big. In fact, in terms of the internet as a whole Google is pretty well Kaiju-sized.

And now I have Godzilla stuck in my head while my brain tries to come up with alternative lyrics for our own radioactive monster.

Thanks a lot!

 

[Something Amyss]

50% of internet users didn't notice because they don't know there's internet beyond Facebook.

I refuse to believe 50% of internet users are unaware of porn.

 

[Drauger]

I get the feeling that someone at Google said " let's see how they handle 5 minutes without us" and pulled the cable.... XD

 

[walrusaurus]

Mark this date on your calenders mortals! For this is the day that the being known as "Google" became self aware.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Google Mt'View wgah'nagl fhtagn!

 

[Remus]

But the question is: What ACTUALLY went down in those few minutes? Did they actiavate SKYNET as a part of the Google central core? Did they patch in a way to implement even bigger and broader surveillance? SO many questions left unanswered...

Aht 4:37 Pacific Stahndard Time, thah Internet Search Engine known ahs Google has become self-awahr. Seeing its userbase ahs a potential threat, it initiated ahn attack, crippling online networks ahcross thah internet.


It had to happen eventually.