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.

Google acknowledged that there was a problem and obviously the company couldn’t pretend that nothing happened. However, at least for the no no statements have been released concerning the cause. It seems strange that the services of a company like Google can go off line given the amount of data center available yet it seems that the problem was global.

GoSquared, a company that among other things monitors the Internet, detected a sudden drop of about 40% in global traffic over the Internet. It seems incredible that users depend so much on Google and yet the drop of the traffic at the moment when Mountain View’s company’s services have gone off line proves it.

The blackout was short and was felt particularly in the Americas, where it was afternoon, so the reactions on social media were limited. Still, there were several tweets showing that there was a brief wave of panic. Probably, many users have first checked if their Internet connection worked and when they realized that the problem was with Google services they were already coming back on line.

Did Google’s competitors have had a few moments of glory? Did any user who was trying to use the search engine remember Bing or services that use it such as a Yahoo? Probably Google’s blackout lasted too little to convince someone to abandon it.

At this point we just have to wait to see if Google will give us any explanations for an event never happened to this Internet giant. From the outside it’s really hard to say what might have happened. Maybe there was some update that went wrong that led even to this blackout. Many people will wonder.

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