Were you hit by the Google outage on August17, 2013? Internet traffic around the world was reduced by about 40% when Google had a complete blackout for up to 5 minutes. The fact that world-wide internet traffic was so significantly impacted just goes to show how much we depend on Google to stay up and running.
The following message was displayed on the Google Apps Dashboard. “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 behavior.” And this message was posted on the Google Apps Dashboard a few minutes later: “Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50% to 70% of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after four minutes.”
No one seems to know what caused the outage and Google isn’t providing any more information to the public beyond the brief messages that were posted to the Google Apps Dashboard. According to Phil Dearson, head of strategy for Tribal Worldwide, the black-out had cost Google an estimated $500,000 (£330,000) just in the few minutes it was down. “This is completely unprecedented, I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” he told Sky News Online. According to Neil McAllister, a writer for website The Register: “Exactly how an operation like Google’s can even go dark like that, all at once, is anybody’s guess.” For additional information, read more here…