Google crashes, world internet traffic down 40 per cent

For a brief time on Friday afternoon – US pacific standard time –  almost all of Google’s services around the world went dark. As a result global internet traffic immediately dropped by 40 per cent, an extraordinary statistic that speaks to the power and ubiquity of its services.

Analysts have estimated that  those few brief moments of online darkness might have cost Google as much as $500,000.

Attempts by tech publishers around the world to secure a response from Google explaining the outage have so far met with silence. However, ITWire managed to capture a company maintenance message on the Google App store in the few minutes the services were unavailable.

“We're aware of a problem with [app name] affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access [app name], but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour. We will provide an update by 8/17/13 10:37 AM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. The incident lasted 1-5 minutes.”