Our use and reliance of Google services has been confirmed when web analytics claimed that global internet traffic plunged by 40% during a 5 minute period when all off Google services suffered unexpected downtime. Google services such as Gmail, Google Search, YouTube and Google Drive all went down at the same time.
The reason for the unexpected downtime is not yet known as Google have so far refused to comment on the cause.
During the downtime, a message appeared on the Google Apps Dashboard. The message stated, “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour.”
This was then followed up by another message which stated, “ Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50 to 70 percent of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after four minutes.”
Web analytics firm GoSquared claimed that internet traffic plummeted by around 40% during the downtime. Simon Tabor who is a developer at GoSquared stated, “That’s huge. As internet users, our reliance on Google.com being up is huge. It’s also of note that page views spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their destination.”
Phil Dearson who is the head of strategy for Tribal Worldwide revealed that he believes it was a physical infrastructure that caused the downtime.
Dearson stated, “This is completely unprecedented, I’ve never heard of anything like this before. One or two of Google’s services have gone down in the past, like Gmail and Google Apps, but they both happened separately. It’s a massive surprise for all of Google’s services to go down at the same time.”
Such an incident shows that any company, no matter of their size and infrastructure that they have in place can suffer from downtime. This has an impact financially and on the company’s reputation. This incident shows the importance of having a good backup and business continuity plan in place for all companies to ensure that all data is protected and to keep downtime to a minimum.
