Google Outage Halts 40 Percent of Internet Traffic

[Eric the Orange]

And soon, Google will complete it's plan of being a larger portion of the internet than porn.

 

[Avaholic03]

Wow, talk about an overreaction. What you could say was "during those 5 minutes, business was 40% more efficient because employees couldn't just fuck around on the internet". It's not like Google is an irreplaceable service. I'm far more concerned with the lack of ISP competition. At least in my area, we only have 2 real choices for broadband...if one of them disappears, hello monopoly and price gouging. That would be far more damaging than losing Google services and having to find alternatives (which already exist for pretty much every service offered by Google).

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I don't think it's just the search engine going down that causes problems. A few weeks back, Google had another hiccup where it was inaccessible to a lot of people, including me- and a good number of sites completely unrelated to Google started having problems (up to and including the New York Times). Why? Because Google handles advertising services for a LOT of websites- and when the ad servers go unresponsive, sites that depend on them just sort of have an aneurysm and take forever (or outright refuse) to load.

 

[Gearhead mk2]

This really scares me. I don't use Google unless other search engines can't find what I'm looking for, but this really does go to show just how monolithic Google is. If they turned (more) evil or went down for good, then that's a decent sized chunk of the net gone.

 

[Callate]

So would it be accurate to suggest that Google has become "too big to fail"...?

 

[Drauger]

After reading this, I tried finding another search engine, you know what? just cause paranoia I'll start using duckduckgo XD, I realized I'm too Google dependent.

 

[Chessrook44]

Eh, I've been using Yahoo for years. Never used Google for ANYTHING but its map service.

And technically YouTube, I guess.

[zzzzHHHWIT-]Yah-HOOOOOOOO-ooo-OOO!

I can't be the only one who remembers that.

 

[Nurb]

This bears reposting... how big google is, and how big it's planning to be.

 

[Quiet Stranger]

Is anyone else reminded of that Twilight Zone episode "The monsters are due on Maple Street"?

 

[wildpeaks]

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.

+1 google's search so frustrating in the past years as it never finds what I'm looking for 9 out of 10 times (whereas it was fine some years ago) while duckduckgo seems to have no problem with how I formulate searches given it almost always find exactly what I was searching, that's why I didn't even notice it was down until the post on HN :/

 

[Illithidae]

This bears reposting... how big google is, and how big it's planning to be.

Sounds like an awful bunch of fear-mongering to me, not that I know much about Google's plans. Statements from the presenter are put in the same style as quotes from the company (but without the quotation marks, of course) and, for another thing, the presenter confuses "owning your computer" with "giving you an alternative to Internet Explorer."

OT: Unless I'm mistaken, the duration of the outage doesn't really matter; if we assume that there aren't any surge periods, the amount of Google usage would remain the same at any time of the day. 40% is still a large amount, though.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

When google goes down, you can't google the answer why its down. Its a paradox.

 

[Nurb]

This bears reposting... how big google is, and how big it's planning to be.

[youtube]

Sounds like an awful bunch of fear-mongering to me, not that I know much about Google's plans. Statements from the presenter are put in the same style as quotes from the company (but without the quotation marks, of course) and, for another thing, the presenter confuses "owning your computer" with "giving you an alternative to Internet Explorer."

OT: Unless I'm mistaken, the duration of the outage doesn't really matter; if we assume that there aren't any surge periods, the amount of Google usage would remain the same at any time of the day. 40% is still a large amount, though.

They're talking about the upcomming Google OS

 

[Sniperexpert]

I reckon this recent widespread Google outage for five minutes was conducted by a secret society i won't name as a test of their plan to shutdown the Internet as a part of greater NWO plan so i suggest we keep an eye out for news of other search engines having widespread outages.

 

[Living_Brain]

In other news, Bing also stopped working for 5 minutes at the same time.

 

[purf]

"Google Outage Halts 40 Percent of Internet Traffic"

No. It did not.

"Google Outage caused a 40% drop in pageviews among sites tracked by GoSquared" is more like it.
That graph you have there with no indicator whatsoever of its y-axis? I'll raise you one:

This is a graph of actual traffic. See that dent? Yeah, the one you can't see because it's so tiny someone had to put a circle around it? That is more like the real impact Google's outage had.

fucking sensationalism, really.

 

[BleedingPride]

Maaaaaybe we shouldn't give so much to google, I know it's convenient and all but they have way too much money and power at this point.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

I like your graph a lot better.

You know Escapist is hiring newsies, yes?

They'd never hire him. He bothers to get his facts straight, which is a serious no-no in this biz.