August 24, 2013
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| Google Down For Five Min - IMAGINARY PICTURE |
The disruption started around 4.37pm Pacific Time (7.37am, Saturday, Singapore time) and lasted between one and five minutes, according the Google Apps dashboard. Online tech website The Register said all services were back online by 4.48pm.
The blackout affected Google’s services simultaneously, including Google Drive, Search, YouTube and Gmail.
Internet traffic across the globe plunged in the wake of Google’s services failure, reported India’s Hindustan Times.
According to the report by Web analytics firm GoSquared, global Internet numbers fell 40 per cent, an indication of the tech giant’s hold over global Internet services.
GoSquared developer Simon Tabor told the Sky News television channel: “That’s huge. It’s also of note that page views spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to destinations.”
Digital expert Phil Dearson, Head of Strategy for integrated marketing agency Tribal Worldwide, said the disruption cost Google an estimated US$500,000 (S$637,000) in the few minutes that it was down.
“This is completely unprecedented, I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” he said.
However, tech news website Tech News Plus said it is a drop in the ocean for Google. It said Google generates US$40 billion in annual revenue and that the spike in traffic when services resumed would have adjusted for the initial loss.
Google has acknowledged and addressed the outage on its Google App Status dashboard but did not offer a reason behind the failure.
Industry experts Tech News Plus spoke to are confident it was not the result of any hacking activity. They also said the downtime was an isolated incident and the tech giant did not suffer any meaningful damage.
Quoting Sterling Market Intelligence’s researcher Greg Sterling, The Financial Times said: “This individual outage doesn’t matter. The idea that Google could go down is unsettling to people but it doesn’t create a problem for the company unless it starts to happen more frequently.”
Mr Sterling later joked that “somebody in Mountain View probably unplugged something, then plugged it back in”.
The last time Google experienced such an outage was in 2009.
The Finance Post e-magazine said the outage sparked panic on Twitter as afflicted users rushed to the microblog to get details from other users.
According to Twitter, there was a sudden and very drastic spike in the volume of tweets during those five minutes. Other online users also took to other social networks to air concern over the outage. AGENCIES
Source - http://www.informationweek.com
Google = God
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