Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic

[sir pball]

The event began at approximately 4:37pm Pacific Time and lasted between one and five minutes, according to the Google Apps Dashboard. All of the Google Apps services reported being back online by 4:48pm.

The incident apparently blacked out every service Mountain View has to offer simultaneously, from Google Search to Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and beyond.

...

According to web analytics firm GoSquared, worldwide internet traffic dipped by a stunning 40 per cent during the brief minutes that the Chocolate Factory's services were offline. Here's the graph of what that looked like:

They may be turning into "just another company" (like Apple is still a paragon of creativity, snort) - but just holy crap. That's a lot of the intertubes.

source

[RKP5637]

1. I was online then and wondered WTF, and my paranoid side said, oh no,

you've been blocked from all of the intertubes! What did I do? And on the serious side shows how dependent and vulnerable we are getting on our wired resources ...

[KittyWampus]

8. Jeez, WHAT DID YOU DO (said in voice reserved for pets & shredded toilet paper)!

YOU are the one who broke the internet?

[RKP5637]

10. And now, I control the Universe!

[bemildred]

2. Just letting us know. nt

[think4yourself]

3. Guess they're patched

into the new Utah storage facility now.

[bemildred]

5. +1.

Possible thread win there.

[KittyWampus]

9. pretty funny.

[RKP5637]

11. OMG, that was it! +++ 1,000 +++

[Nictuku]

20. That was my first thought

[BlueStreak]

4. Google is too big to fail

[LuvNewcastle]

6. Scary shit.

The internet is a precious world resource. I don't know how it would be done, but an international organization (the UN?) needs to be put in charge of keeping it safe. Our freedom is in jeopardy if it becomes controlled by an oligarchy, if it isn't already.

[sir pball]

7. I found it to be pretty impressive actually...

Debates about how much influence Google should have aside, I'm quite reassured by the fact that they were able to rectify a failure of literally historic proportions in four minutes. Whatever went wrong was HUGE, far beyond what any failover/backup systems can even conceptualize let alone handle...and it was back up in almost no time. That's some incredibly impressive engineering there.

[Posteritatis]

12. Yep. A lot of people did something *right* for that outage to be that brief. (nt)

[PowerToThePeople]

13. Probably mostly Youtube traffic

[sir pball]

15. Bit too early in the day for that

Granted it was 7:30 EST but there's still a lot of business going on, and a lot of business uses stuff like Drive and especially Analytics - Collusion reports almost every page I visit is phoning home to Analytics, that service probably accounts for a third of Google's activity.

[PowerToThePeople]

16. Not much bandwidth with that traffic

Personally, I block analytics via DNS. It is too invasive. I should just outright dump the ip addresses at my firewall.

[dickthegrouch]

17. I tried that

Doesn't entirely work. (I'm assuming Norton Internet Security was functioning correctly when I used it for said blocking). Google analytics, doubleclick and several others regularly defeat my attempts at protection. They have some clever algorithm for getting around a single IP address and even a domain blockage.

The best way to stop it is using Ghostery to block.

[PowerToThePeople]

18. I run no-script

But, I would think domain blacklisting would work. I have not been monitoring traffic through my firewall, but the results I see using my browser lead me to think that domain blocking is working.

[dickthegrouch]

19. I use both

noscript and ghostery.
ghostery seems to catch a lot of things noscript doesn't.

[justiceischeap]

14. I don't know the numbers but I know a lot of developers

host their javascript from Google--it helps with caching and such. The only other thing that I can think of that would be worse than Google going down is Amazon, since I lot of people use their cloud hosting.