Google outage causes 40% plunge in Internet traffic

Worldwide internet traffic plunged by around 40% as Google services suffered a complete black-out, SkyNews reported, citing 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.


"It’s also of note that pageviews spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their destination."


A message on the Google Apps Dashboard showed all of its services were hit.


"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour," it said.