The August 16, 2013 will remain in the annals of the Internet as the day Google, for five minutesdisappeared almost completely from the Internet. Around 4:52 in the afternoon, Pacific time, all the main services of the Mountain View giant, from Google Search to Gmail, from YouTube to Google Drive, became temporarily unreachable. It was not a simple slowdown: according to data collected by the analysis company GoSquaredin that very short interval of time Global Internet traffic dropped by about 40%. To get a sense of the economic impact, some observers estimated that Google would lose up to half a million dollars in advertising revenue during those few minutes of downtime alone. This blackout, although lasting a few moments, offered a clear snapshot of the dependence of the entire digital economy on the Mountain View giant and reminded us of how vulnerable centralized systems are, in which a single central node, if faulty, can affect millions of users simultaneously. In Italythe interruption occurred shortly after midnight (at 00:52 to be precise) and it didn’t cause that much inconvenience.
Google’s downturn caused a 40% drop in web traffic
Anyone who has tried to access any Google service on August 16, 2013 around 04:52 in the afternoon (Pacific time), he came across error pages or anomalous behavior from the Mountain View giant’s services. The Google Dashboard, the tool that shows the status of Google services in real time, reported that between 50% and 70% of requests to the servers had generated errorsbut the situation was largely resolved in just 1 minute and completely restored after 4. Despite the brevity of the downtime (the causes of which were not clarified by the Mountain View giant), the event was surprising for the simultaneity with which all the group’s services were inaccessible. Simon Tabora developer at the time GoSquaredhe commented like that 40% drop in web traffic is “huge», underlining the extent of our daily dependence on a few major players in the online world.
The blackout also highlighted the economic aspect of the matter: according to calculations by analysts and bloggers, the theoretical loss for Google was around $432,000taking into account that the company was generating approximately 108,000 theoretical dollars per minute.
The incident also demonstrated that the Internet still has resilience tools: alternative and competing services, such as Twitter (now known as
Other important downturns in Google’s history
The downturn recorded in August 2013 was not an isolated case. Google had already experienced a Extended blackout in 2009 and, in months prior to 2013had recorded short Gmail and Google Drive malfunctions. However, the 40% drop in global Internet traffic and the simultaneous blocking of all services made the August 16 episode particularly memorable.
