Google outage reportedly caused big drop in global traffic

For a very brief few minutes on Friday you may have noticed some Google services, most notably search, appeared to be down. If not, maybe you noticed the ensuing freak-out across Twitter and the rest of the Internet.

At first glance the flash outage was little more than an opportunity for a few good one-liners and a chance to actually stand up from the keyboard and walk around for a few minutes. If we had connected nanobots floating around in our bloodstreams, certainly they would have registered a worldwide uptick in caffeine intake during those few moments.

As it turns out though, Google's downtime did appear to have global, measurable repercussions, according to analytics firm GoSquared, which estimates that it caused a 40 percent drop in global traffic during a five-minute window:

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.