Google faces 5-minute outage and web traffic worldwide takes nosedive

So just how important is Google to global Internet users? Enough to throw everyone into a tizzy if it goes down for a few minutes, shows today’s incident. Google’s services went down this morning at around 4:20 AM IST for round about 5 minutes, causing a massive dive in web traffic all over the world.

Some of Google’s services, including Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and Google Calendar appeared to be down this morning for a brief while for some reason. While it was still early in the morning for this part of the world, it was afternoon halfway across the globe in America. The outage therefore caused a massive outpour of panicky posts on Twitter.

Check out that huge dive!

While a user named @andrewchen wrote, “Google is down. Time to use Bing?” another user called @stevesilberman quipped, “The Fourth Horseman rides: Google is down. I knew that Area 51 news was trouble,” referring to the recent admission of the US government that the top secret Area 51 existed.

Google acknowledged the downtime on its status page and pegged the outage duration between 1 and 5 minutes. Meanwhile, the outage showed a sharp dip in web traffic across the world for that period of time. Analytics firm GoSquared said that the estimated drop in traffic was about 40 percent. “Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 BST on 16th August 2013. This had a huge effect in the number of pageviews coming into GoSquared’s real-time tracking - around a 40% drop, as this graph of our global pageviews per minute shows. That’s huge. As internet users, our reliance on google.com being up is huge. It’s also of note that pageviews spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their destination,” it wrote.