Life without Google at 23:52?

Summary: Google is a too-big-to-fall player in the internet. In the summer of 2013, a disruption to Google services caused a 40% drop in global traffic. Below is a document of the incident.

On 16th August 2013 between 23:52 and 23:57 BST, Google’s services were down for several minutes. The official downtime according to a Google status page was between 1 and 5 minutes.

According to the analytics firm GoSquared, the disruption caused a 40 percent drop in global traffic during a five-minute period:

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.

(Credit: GoSquared)

Note the dive at around 23:53 when the outrage began and the subsequent peak at around 23:58 when the services mostly resumed.

This sudden disruption to service reveals that Google has become an indispensable part of netizens, rendering Bing and Yahoo quite irrelevant. At its hands, Google has gathered the superpower to control the world in ways unimaginable before. If Google were the target of terrorist attack, the casualty would be even more severe than atomic bombs.