Search giant Google proved just how important it is to the Internet yesterday.
Around 6:55 p.m.EST Google went down for five minutes causing a 40 percent drop in Internet traffic, and some panic.
According to searchengineland.com:
“It wasn’t you. It was Google. Specifically, Google.com went down around 3:50 p.m. pacific time for about five minutes, a very rare occurrence.
“The last time something even close to this happened was probably in January 2009, when for about 40 minutes, Google labeled every site in its results as malware, due to a human error.”
Other Google applications such as Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar and all clouds services were affected by the outage as well.
It shows just how dependent everyone’s Web experience is on Google. What is also interesting is that when Google went down, people turned to Twitter to try to find out what’s going, which is an indication of Twitter’s growing level of importance as well.
Rachel King of zdnet.com noted some of the best tweets about the outage:
“Google is down? Did we reach the edge of the Internet?”
— VanessaHopeSchneider (@VHSchneider) August 16, 2013
Of course Google would host their own f*** status page on their own f*** infrastructure http://t.co/OP5i2XU2GO < Not useful!
— Jack Clark (@mappingbabel) August 16, 2013
Microsoft’s YouTube app team high-fives as their Operation Takedown is wildly successful.
— Ed Bott (@edbott) August 16, 2013
