Google down for a minute, Net traffic dips 40%

Internet traffic across the world plunged by 40% after all Google services from e-mail to video sharing and search suffered a complete and unprecedented black-out on Sunday, according to web analytics experts. The web giant said all its services from Google Search to Gmail to video sharing site YouTube, and its remote server, the Google Drive, went down for all of 1-5 minutes. The reason for the outage in not yet known and Google refused to divulge any further information.

Google’s India spokespersons could not be reached.

This is the first time ever that all of Google’s services have been hit simultaneously. In the past, one or two services such as Gmail and Google Apps have crashed, but in separate incidents.

According to web analytics firm GoSquared, global internet traffic fell by around 40% during the black-out, reflecting Google’s vice-like grip on global Internet services.

“That’s huge,” GoSquared developer Simon Tabor told Sky News.  “It’s also of note that pageviews spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to destinations.”

Digital expert Phil Dearson, head of strategy for Tribal Worldwide, said the black-out had cost Google an estimated loss of $500,000 (Rs 3 crore) in the few minutes that it was down. “This is completely unprecedented, I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” he told Sky News Online.