Google Outage: Internet Traffic Plunges 40% 352
cold fjord writes "Is 40% anything to worry about? Sky News reports, 'Worldwide internet traffic plunged by around 40% as Google services suffered a complete black-out, according to web analytics experts. The tech company said all of its services from Google Search to Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive went down for between one and five minutes last night. The reason for the outage is not yet known, and Google refused to provide any further information when contacted by Sky News Online. According to web analytics firm GoSquared, global internet traffic fell by around 40% during the black-out, reflecting Google's massive grip on the web. "That's huge," said GoSquared developer Simon Tabor. "As internet users, our reliance on Google.com being up is huge."'
Details on Google Apps Status Dashboard (Score:5, Informative)
See Google Apps Status Dashboard [google.com] for more details (hover over red outage dots for times).
Re:Details on Google Apps Status Dashboard (Score:5, Funny)
NSA Wiretap installed (Score:4, Insightful)
NSA installed one of it's man.in.the.middle data centers perhaps.
Re:NSA Wiretap installed (Score:5, Funny)
NSA installed one of it's man.in.the.middle data centers perhaps.
Yup. Microsoft had their man-in-the-middle stuff form the NSA installed last week, causing their outage of cloud and email services.
Either that, or there's a glitch in the Matrix and we'll have to climb down the main wet-wall rather than the fire escape.
buffer overrun (Score:3)
It's probably just a buffer overrun on the Prism-Google interface.
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Frankly said, this whole thing is just stupidly blown out of proportion. Who the fuck cares that gmail or something like that is down for a couple of minutes, especially that it's quite rare that those services are down? It's not like cash registers at Walmart run on it and there's ten million bucks lost every minute it's down. Sheesh.
The interesting bit isn't that Google was down. The interesting bit is that when Google went down it took 40% of all internet traffic with it. It illustrates how big a foothold the company has on the internet as a whole.
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...their science "reporters" don't know the difference between an asteroid, a comet and meteor...
There's a difference?
Oh well. it probably doesn't matter to most voters so it doesn't matter to any elected representative so let's defund NASA.
Google.com? (Score:4, Funny)
I use google.fr, you insensitive clod!
Re:Google.com? (Score:5, Funny)
If you use google.fr, that's insensitive Claude for you!
As I keep having to say to my older family.. (Score:5, Informative)
Pro Tip: Rather than Googling 'Facebook' you could use a bookmark, or try www.facebook.com
Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
Pro Tip: Rather than Googling 'Facebook' you could use a bookmark, or try www.facebook.com
Facebook is definitely Googles main threat (when will they release their own search engine). Its why Google are throwing everything behind Google+. I have been astonished how Microsoft/Apple have been prepared to squander their respective advantages by not having a social network, preferring to support Facebook against Google.
Re:Facebook (Score:4, Insightful)
I have been astonished how Microsoft/Apple have been prepared to squander their respective advantages by not having a social network, preferring to support Facebook against Google.
Probably because they're not fools.
You know who talks about G+? G+ users. That's about it. The value of a social network is based on the number of people involved, and Google failed hardcore at attracting users. Having blown their load, G+ is about as much of a threat to Facebook as MySpace is.
Google+ is growing (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably because they're not fools.
Except Googe+ is growing, and even though it is in no way eclipsing Facebook. Yahoo was dominant in search; Apple was dominant in smartphones; Hotmail was dominant in internet mail. How is the fact that there is strong player in the market relevant, both Apple and Microsoft could benefit from having their own social network, and Facebook is a threat to both.
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Re:Google+ is growing (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Google+ user, I definitely don't want Google and Facebook to capture the same market. People are definitely part of the reason why I prefer G+ over Facebook.
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As a Google+ user, I definitely don't want Google and Facebook to capture the same market. People are definitely part of the reason why I prefer G+ over Facebook.
You may wish to "explain" this, for my old, cranky, mid-30's, anti-social pov, which sees both full of narcissistic trash.
Re:Google+ is growing (Score:5, Interesting)
Facebook seems to revolve a lot around resharing vague funny images. G+ is more about real discussion. Resharing images does happen on occasion, but not to the point where it becomes tedious. In the early days of G+, there was such an image listing the most talked about person on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. They were some pop star, some other pop star, and Albert Einstein, respectively.
Call it elitist if you like, but I vastly prefer the topics of discussion on G+ over those on Facebook.
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This is not the result of the social network you use. It is the result of you choosing to only let in your circle people with whom you want a certain kind of conversation.
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Dear god, can you imagine a Microsoft social network... Presumably all new sign-ups would be auto-friended to Clipit.
Apple's would just be some kind of hybrid prison/sandpit.
Re:Google+ is growing (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple's would just be some kind of hybrid prison/sandpit.
But do you get an official Hutt sendoff?
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How do you measure growing? Sure, I have an account. Because I did it to get gmail to stop nagging me. I [i]never[/i] use it, and have no plans to.
If anything I'm wasting resources for G+!
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They are posting nothing I want to read.
Keep Google + small and smart please.
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The young ones, too. My 12 year old step son uses the browser search bar for everything - even "youtube". It's maddening!
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This is why Google is #1 and Facebook respectively is #2
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Pro Tip: Rather than Googling 'Facebook' you could use a bookmark, or try www.facebook.com
I like how this is modded +5 Informative. Thanks for the handy tip! I shall bookmark this page in perpetuity so that I never forget.
Actually, Tragically Funny == Informative (Score:4, Informative)
Just a note for those who don't mod frequently and might wonder about the actual utility of this post for /.ers.
Re:As I keep having to say to my older family.. (Score:5, Funny)
I'll just search for "site:slashdot.org how do I get to facebook without using google"
Re:As I keep having to say to my older family.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you type in the url wrong, you go somewhere wrong. You also have to get the . and the com right. To top that off, they already need to use a search engine for other things, so by using it for everything they have one less thing to think about. It makes perfect sense. You are like a carpenter wondering why everyone else doesn't have $100k worth of woodworking tools lying around. What if they need a triangle-shaped saw, you ask, what are those fools going to do then? Why won't they invest the time and money into learning the right tool for the job? Because they don't need those specialized tools that you and I use.
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How many people don't know a 2nd search engine? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder for how many people the internet becomes completely inaccessible without Google? (I also still occasionally meet people who do not know what a 'browser' is, and who think that IE is their only option).
Google is a good search engine, but there are alternatives. If Google stopped working, I wouldn't suffer very much, I think. (When Gmail crashes, I think that for gmail users this is another issue... but I use alternative email).
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Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine? (Score:5, Informative)
GoogleAPI gives you the ability to choose an exact version of the script, and maintains that as a permalink, so when the next version becomes available your code isn't broken.
The advantage of using GoogleAPI far outweighs your perceived negatives - Google has a far better uptime and availability than any other free host, they often place the most frequently used scripts into the Google search homepage using the same link as you would, so stuff like jQuery et al are already cached by a high percentage of your visitors, and it goes someway to cut down a small percentage of my traffic, especially if I maintain multiple sites or subdomains that use the same scripts.
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Yup, easily done :)
Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine? (Score:5, Informative)
I had an issue where my ISP's homepage used google scripts, so when I was capped (yes, that happens here, we pay ~$2/GB) their page wouldn't load completely and I couldn't top up my account, even though they allowed requests to their page while capped.
Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine? (Score:4, Insightful)
But if you put your scripts in the same place as the rest of your website, then while the uptime may not be as good, it at least exactly correlates with the uptime of the rest of the site.
Your site will be down if the hosting provider of that site is down, or if the hosting provider of the scripts is down. Having a different hosting provider can only ever mean more potential downtime.
Outlook out for 3 Days (Score:2)
If Google stopped working, I wouldn't suffer very much, I think. (When Gmail crashes, I think that for gmail users this is another issue... but I use alternative email).
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/17/4631622/microsoft-apologies-for-outlook-and-activesync-downtime-says-error [theverge.com] Your email could be out three days not one minute.
Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, when Google crashes it's no problem for me; find some other search engines and bing! I'm surfing again in no time.
Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine? (Score:5, Funny)
but how can you find other search engines without googling them?
Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox's search engine drop-down selector.
Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine? (Score:4, Funny)
yah, I'll google how to use that.
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what does it matter when the traffic analytics is done via google analytics..
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People at my work have Bing set as their default search so they literally Bing, Google click on the link and then Google what they were actually looking for, it's insane.
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When you are talking about 40% of internet traffic, it is mostly YouTube rather than the google search engine. YouTube accounts for something like 98% of all video on demand, and video makes up a substantial amount of all internet traffic.
If it is just people googling for facebook, probably most of them didn't notice, because they were already on facebook when google went down.
Re:How many people don't know a 2nd search engine? (Score:5, Informative)
The fact that a minute downtime is big news is definitely saying something. Both about the reliability of Google's servers, and the impact of their products.
Cause (Score:5, Informative)
How much of the plunge was due to lack of search / app availability vs third party pages not loading properly do to analytics and other google dependencies?
Re:Cause (Score:4, Informative)
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I have NoScript set to not allow Google Analytics and other client-side stuff for ad tracking (block Doubleclick and such too), and not allowing them doesn't appreciably slow things down.
I guess that allowing them and having the browser timing out on requests is a bit of a different story though - or having any back end dependency on them.
I'm the type that loves my MP3s but still likes that I have my CD collection in a binder as a backup. I love Netflix and Amazon Instant video, but I still have my DVD coll
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How much of the plunge was due to lack of search / app availability vs third party pages not loading properly do to analytics and other google dependencies?
This is slashdot, so naturally I did not RTFA but I was wondering if the drop was actually due to YouTube. If they are measuring traffic in the amount of data flowing through the network, then YouTube is the obvious choice. If they are talking about page hits then I would guess that its due to the search engine being down.
40%? No. (Score:5, Informative)
This is how the "40%" looked in real life:
http://www.crackajack.de/2013/08/18/google-goes-down-for-2-minutes-fucks-up-100-of-all-journalists/
(Mind the circle in the yellow graphics: It shows the real decline in internet traffic at the German Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), the largest internet exchange point worldwide.)
Further reading: What is DE-CIX? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DE-CIX
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Mod parent up. The 40% figure is bullshit claimed by a single stats agency.
Re:40%? No. (Score:5, Interesting)
What is an internet exchange?
It's a place where providers peer when they are not exchanging enough traffic to justify private peering. Exchange point connections are cheap compared to transit but expensive compared to private peering links. Traffic from major access providers to the likes of google is unlikely to go through an internet exchange because with that volume of traffic private peering is more economical.
Which is not to say the 40% figure is true, it's just to say that traffic on an internet exchange is not a reprepsenative sample of internet traffic
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This is how the "40%" looked in real life: http://www.crackajack.de/2013/08/18/google-goes-down-for-2-minutes-fucks-up-100-of-all-journalists/ [crackajack.de]
(Mind the circle in the yellow graphics: It shows the real decline in internet traffic at the German Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), the largest internet exchange point worldwide.)
Further reading: What is DE-CIX? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DE-CIX [wikipedia.org]
The vast majority of Google traffic bypasses internet exchanges and is carried directly between ISPs and Google.
Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of them even access their own company website like this. Or their social networks etc. While I never understood why they do it (or use a browser which actually works this way like Chrome or Safari, where the URL bar also is the search field), this if course means a single point of failure. If they are not able to access google, they don't how to access the website they "search".
And while I am of course not talking about technical adept people, most of them are no morons who are simply not able to comprehend the difference...it's just the way they access the internet...through google (so they think).
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a bit like the early 90's.
I had almost everyone's telephone number memorized, then cellphones got popular and slowly I forgot everyone's telephone number as they were now coded into my cellphone.
I suspect something similar is at play here.
People* don't really remember full urls any more, they just search for the closest and Google sorts the rest.
* When I say people, I mean the general public.
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I had almost everyone's telephone number memorized, then cellphones got popular and slowly I forgot everyone's telephone number as they were now coded into my cellphone.
Your analogy compares better with bookmarks though.
What people are doing now is calling like 411 every time they want to call their friends.
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It was the norm from the start in countries that use non-Latin characters. For example in Japan all the adverts just say "search for..." rather than giving the URL, and internet companies have more freedom to name themselves because they don't feel the need to have a memorable domain name.
In China they tried phone-number-like domains such as 82742.com for a while, but it didn't work very well.
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URLs of the things that are important to me are mostly really long and complicated. The folders in the FF Bookmark Toolbar make life easy, though.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Funny)
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Aside from the inherent stupidity - have these people heard of bookmarks?
The, I don't know for sure, probably 3rd feature or so the very first browser got?
If they really are that dumb, making friends has never been easier - just show them how bookmarks work. They'll think you are a computing god. :-/
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of them have not only very high scientific degrees, but are also on the board of larger (>600 employees), successful companies.
They might not have the computer knowledge you have, but I wouldn't be so ignorant to call anyone a moron because he is not savvy in one partical field or is simply not interested in becoming more savvy, as the way he operates the internet until know worked for him and he does not have the need or interest to expand his knowledge there.
How many bright people drive cars without even knowing the simplest things about combustion engines and drivetrains? Are they all morons? There, that's our car analogy for this topic.
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How many bright people drive cars without even knowing the simplest things about combustion engines and drivetrains? Are they all morons?
(I'm not the one who called them morons, and I don't think all of them are of sub-average intelligence.)
None, I hope. Everyone who drives should have basic knowledge of how cars work, how to check and add fluids and that there are things called drain plugs for various oils and fluids -- even if in modern vehicles they're almost impossible to get to.
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why should they? what good does any of that knowledge do when there guys named Bob or Mike willing to do all that for you for only 15$, both faster and cheaper than you could yourself, while you go do something else with your time?
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Why?
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They might not have the computer knowledge you have, but I wouldn't be so ignorant to call anyone a moron because he is not savvy in one partical field or is simply not interested in becoming more savvy, as the way he operates the internet until know worked for him and he does not have the need or interest to expand his knowledge there.
You can safely ignore anyone who throws around terms like moron and stupid. I think we all know why.
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Why don't you store the address in the bookmark toolbar?
NSA? (Score:2, Funny)
Reason for the outage:
NSA has been tinkering with google servers, to milk as much info as possible before more google customer draining happens.
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Actually that is far more likely to be true than funny. This seems very much like a core psy vs spy configuration change, whether it was to take something out or put something in remains to be seen. In light of recent exposure taking something out seems more likely.
At the end of the day, this should be a major wake up call for Google and having a more regionally distributed system, which of course is what the internet was originally designed to be so that no single point of failure can take down the enti
NSA rerouting traffic (Score:4, Interesting)
It was just the NSA patching in their new data center...
Google isn't part of the internet anymore (Score:5, Funny)
The internet is now part of Google.
Needs a decentralised alternative (Score:3)
We (as in, we users of the Internet) should not be so reliant on a single entity's web services, just as we (as computer users) are not reliant on a single entity's OS. Guess what, you can participate in a decentralised web search engine right away, with project YaCy [yacy.net], by running a node on your computer(s). There are very few nodes at the moment given the potential, and the search will only get better as more people join.
So. It has come to this. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: So. It has come to this. (Score:3)
The original visionaries at DARPA must be rolling in their grave...
Not likely, the network is functioning beyond expectations. Hypertext is merely one of many protocols operating on this global network, and in twenty years it may not even be used. IP however, and probably TCP/UDP, will still be used a hundred years from now. Hopefully we'll have migrated to IPv6 by then...
Re:So. It has come to this. (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't 40% of "the internet", it was 40% of internet traffic and the bulk of it would have been YouTube streaming videos. Netflix is also quite a large proportion. No need to panic though, they are just bandwidth heavy protocols, not 40% of every service and website on the internet.
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For a few minutes this probably put Netflix at 90% of Internet traffic.
Youtube (Score:2)
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If it was night everywhere at the same time then that could be a reason for it, yes.
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Score:0?!!
The most intelligent remark in this thread?
Could've been worse (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine if the NSA servers went down, nothing would be getting through.
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They also monitor only a small percentage of 'net traffic, but I thought that it was worth a little inaccuracy for the sake of a joke.
I was mistaken.
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The man in the middle
Went out for a piddle
And the whole web went suddenly dark.
It was quite a riddle
To the man with the fiddle
All these geeks playing tag in the park.
Not that big of a deal. (Score:5, Interesting)
The short duration exaggerates the issue. If Google were to go away for a day or a week, most everyone would switch to some other service like Bing, etc. But when it goes down for just a few minutes people don't even have time to figure out that google is the problem itself rather than a hiccup in their internet connection. Most people will just hit reload a couple of times, curse, check their phone for text messages and by then everything has recovered and they quickly forget that there even was a problem.
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^^THIS^^
The first few minutes of a RARE outage for me, even a single site, I often assume it might be a hiccup with my connection.
In which case I either let my PC sit for a couple of minutes (or reboot) while I grab a glass of water.
If everything is working by the time I get back, then cool. If not then I start to investigate and act accordingly. My PC? My connection? The DNS I'm using? This site's service provider? etc.
However it's quite rare that I have an ISP issue or one of the sites I traffic oft
Fake numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
40% did NOT drop. 40% measured by this one stats agency dropped. They don't measure Bittorrent, Usenet, Netflix or other bandwidth eaters. The real number is likely to be much much lower.
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Yup... see here [google.com].
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Especially since web traffic is a comparatively small part of overall Internet traffic these days. Yes, I used to work for an ISP and I had numbers broken down by port and protocol in front of me. It's been two years, but I don't think anything dramatic has changed.
So, if it's 40% of web traffic, that translates to somewhere around 5-10% of total traffic. Still massive for one company.
How does google account for 40% of traffic?! (Score:2)
Something I haven't seen explained in the couple articles I've read on this is why all google services going out would account for 40% of all internet traffic. Am I supposed to believe that at any given moment, 40% of all internet traffic is consumed by gmail, youtube, and web searches? And out of that, how much of the traffic was accounted for by youtube? That is the ONLY seemingly viable element that could really contribute that much, because of the sheer amount of data each transaction with youtube cons
That reminds me (Score:4, Funny)
The past participle of google is googled.
What is the p.p. of bing? bung?
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I've posted this before... (Score:2)
... I will post it again. This relates to the page views GoSquared measures, NOT to the entire internet.
GoSquared self-describes as "trusted by 30,000 businesses", which is not a small number, but also doesn't really compare to the number of businesses with websites out there. http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/ [whois.sc] says there are about 150 mio domains (in the most popular gTLDs). Assuming domains is a decent measure for websites (which it isn't, but let's go with that for now), at best GoSquared measures
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I can explain it... (Score:2, Interesting)
Windows Server 2012 upgrades on all their servers...
What? Windows is so good I am certain that Google runs windows.... The MS guys here cant be lying to me.
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Some people (copyright holder , ISP) pretended bittorent was swamping them with more than 75% traffic being bittorent... But if traffic fell 40% with google outage, and there is anyway other type of traffic, then bittorent cannot be that high in volume.
these asshats didn't look at the backbone statistics.. just page refreshes on pages which didn't load due to relying on google scripts!