In today’s news of catastrophes that barely caused ripples, the New York Daily News reports that Earth’s collective respiratory system, Google, blacked out entirely for five minutes at about 8 am AEST yesterday.
It looked something like this, but with a lot more screaming nerds who were just trying to add a few more virtual amigos on Google +:
Five minutes without precious Gmail, Youtube, Google Drive and the search engine (providing the brain-frying meta problem of not being able to google whether the internet was, in fact, broken) might not seem like a big deal, but the inexplicable outage reportedly cost Google half a million dollars, and caused global traffic to plunge by 40%. It’s pretty frightening to think that we rely on Google to power almost half of the internet—what if the servers conked it for real?
Servers that power some of Google’s sites—YouTube, Gmail—have certainly gone down in the past, but never simultaneously or to this degree. But anyway, the internet has un-broken itself so onwards and upwards, carry on, we’ll get through this, etc.
Via NY Daily News, news.com.au
