Googles Four Minute Blackout Examined

Google hasnt explained Fridays four-minute blackout of all Google services, but experts say a hack attack is not the likely cause.

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Googles services went dark Friday, as the company suffered a massive -- albeit temporary -- blackout.
During the outage, which occurred Friday afternoon Pacific Time, the volume of global Internet traffic reportedly
plunged by about 40%
, according to Web analytics firm GoSquared.
Thats huge, GoSquared developer Simon Tabor said in a blog post. As Internet users, our reliance on Google.com being up is huge. Its also of note that pageviews spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their destination.
According to Googles
Apps Status Dashboard
, all of its services -- from Gmail and Google Documents to
Postini
and Blogger -- were affected by the outage, which the search giant said lasted less than five minutes.
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, according to Googles dashboard.
[ Use Gmail? Dont expect your messages to be confidential. See
Gmail Is Not A Privacy Problem
. ]
Multiple analysts discounted the outage having any long-term impact on Googles revenue. This individual outage doesnt really matter, Greg Sterling, a researcher with Sterling Market Intelligence,
told the
Financial Times
. The idea that Google could go down is unsettling to people, but it doesnt create a problem for the company unless it starts to happen more frequently.
A Google spokesman, contacted outside of normal business hours Monday, didnt immediately respond to a request for comment about what caused the outage. But Sterling said the blackout likely wasnt the result of a hack attack. Somebody in Mountain View probably unplugged something, then plugged it back in, he said.
People temporarily robbed of access to Googles services quickly posted on other sites. My life came to an end as I know it for three minutes -- Google everything was down -- google.com, google apps, google sites, the entire enchilada,
posted a user named Rick
to the Sitedown.co website. I thought this [expletive deleted] was failsafe?
Likewise, social analytics firm Topsy recorded a
surge in related tweets
, including a joke from Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Land blog. Google went down because it was told it could no longer have 20% time and didnt like it, he
tweeted
, referring to recent reports that Google has discontinued the practice of
giving all employees one day
per week to work on personal projects. That 20% time policy reportedly lead to such innovations as Gmail, Google Talk and Google News.
The outage is a reminder that
cloud services arent infallible
. Earlier this year, for example,
Google Apps was inaccessible
to some customers for a couple of hours. Last year, meanwhile, Amazon experienced four blackouts, including a
Christmas Eve outage
that was blamed on an Amazon developer accidentally deleting essential data from production systems.

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Googles Four Minute Blackout Examined