If Google goes down, how much web traffic is lost?

Google is one of those companies, that managed to turn its brand name into the generic term for what it does, like bandaids or iPods. It's  so embedded in our culture in-fact, that a lot of people don't even know there are alternatives. So it's no surprise that if Google does down, a very rare thing, that the internet itself stutters. However, the question is “by how much?”

A duck's quacks only echo if there's someone there to hear them…

Funnily enough, we find ourself pondering this question less than 36 hours after it happened. As Wired reports, at just eight to midnight on Saturday night, Google had an outage that dropped all of its services at once. No Gmail, no Youtube, it was all gone for a brief two minute spell. According to a Google spokesperson, during the two to three minute downtime, almost three quarters of requests sent to Google timed out or received errors.

Ultimately, this resulted in a drop of over 40 per cent of worldwide web traffic. Even downing Facebook and Twitter combined would be unlikely to have that sort of effect.

KitGuru Says: Did any of you have your web browsing activities hindered on the night in question? If so, how close were you to thinking that life as we know it had come to an end?

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