When Google Goes Down, So Does 5 Percent Of The Internet?
That's the statistic offered by Arbor Networks' Craig Labovitz, who in a Thursday blog post and Web traffic graph noted that between 10:15 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Thursday, average traffic across 10 tier-one and tier-two Internet service providers declined 5 percent.
"If you happen to be Google and your content constitutes up to five percent of all Internet traffic, people notice," Labovitz wrote. "Network engineers around the world frantically e-mail traceroutes to mailing lists. IRC channels fill with speculation. And end users Twitter (a lot)."
It wasn't just Google itself being affected, either.
The Web performance research firm Gomez told Business Week that the Google outage also slowed response times for Web sites in 238 of the 560 global regions Gomez covers -- a result of the disrupted Google Analytics service and the millions of Web pages that use Google Analytics to track content.
In a statement on Gomez's website, CTO Imad Mouline outlined the implications of what he described as a "ripple effect."
"The impact of Google's problems demonstrates the complexity of today's Web sites and their susceptibility to performance issues when third-party content or service providers experience problems," Mouline said. "Many web properties were probably unaware of today's situation, because traditional monitoring solutions would not detect the issue or isolate the root cause."
According to Google, which took personal responsibility for the outage in a blog post, the problems started about 7:48 a.m. E.T. on Thursday, and ended up disrupting service for more than 14 percent of Google users worldwide. Google blamed the problem on a "traffic jam" that occurred when it erroneously routed some of its Web traffic to Asia.
"We've been working hard to make our services ultra-fast and 'always on,' so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens," wrote Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president of operations for Google, in the blog post.
That Google being disrupted for a few hours managed to cause such a stir is one more indication of the Internet market share it commands. The latest figures from Internet traffic researcher comScore put Google's share of search in the U.S. at just shy of 64 percent -- and climbing.