August 16, 2013 will go down in the annals of the Internet as the day in which Google, for five minutes, almost completely disappeared 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 period of time global Internet traffic dropped by approximately 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 Italy, the outage occurred shortly after midnight (at 00:52 to be precise) and didn’t cause that much inconvenience.
Google’s downturn caused a 40% drop in web traffic
Anyone who tried to access any Google service on August 16, 2013 at around 04:52 in the afternoon (Pacific time) encountered 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 errors, but 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 due to the simultaneity with which all the group’s services were inaccessible. Simon Tabor, developer at the time GoSquaredcommented how that 40% drop in Web traffic was «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 432,000 dollars, taking into account that the company generated around 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 prolonged blackout in 2009 and, in the months preceding 2013, had experienced brief malfunctions of Gmail and Google Drive. However, the 40% drop in global Internet traffic and the simultaneous blocking of all services made the August 16 episode particularly memorable.
