The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Google

Web traffic fell by 40% during Google outage

Author

By Ishbel Macleod | PR and social media consultant

August 19, 2013 | 2 min read

Google services suffered a black-out for four minutes on Saturday, with global web traffic falling by 40 per cent during this period; showing the hold that the internet giant has.

Google has not commented on what caused the error on Saturday night, which left Gmail accounts without access before affecting other services.

GoSquared, the web analytics firm, noted the drop in traffic, as well as a rise in page views after the search engine was back up again.

At the time, Google said on each service: “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.”

Updating users on the Google Apps dashboard, the company said: “The problem with Gmail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.

“Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50 per cent to 70 per cent of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after four minutes.”

An alternate version of the message appeared on Google Drive, Google Documents, Google Groups and other pages.

Google

More from Google

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +