August 17, 2013

Graph showing the drop in the Internet traffic when Google's services went offline. Times are GMT (Image courtesy GoSquared Engineering. All rights reserved)

In Europe it was night and in the Americas it was still Friday afternoon when Google services went off line for a few minutes. The immediate consequence was a drop of about 40% of the Internet traffic, which means that it almost halved. The various Google services have returned to work after a few minutes causing a spike in traffic but the drop shows the great importance of Google.