Real-time web analytics GoSquared reported that Google suffered from an outage which lasted for between one to five minutes causing a 40 percent drop on the global traffic on Friday.
The outage happened between 3:51 and 3:52 p.m PDT wherein almost 70 percent of requests submitted by users encountered errors. Most of the services affected were restored a minute later but the entire system needed four minutes to fully recover.
During the downtime, the Google Apps Board immediately posted a message.
"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 behavior," it said.
Google declined to comment about the outage when the Sky News tried to reach out to them. However, a digital expert gave the news website an estimated loss that the tech giant had to deal with in such a short time-- amounting to $500,000. But for a company earning billions of dollars in a year, such amount may not be a big deal anyway. It is also unlikely that businesses will steer away from Google since such event doesn't happen all the time.
What happened to Google is really new because all of its apps went down as displayed by Google's Apps Status Board itself. There were previous incidents when Gmail and Google Apps went dark but those happened separately. Most experts where still baffled how the entire system could crash.
Phil Dearson, head of strategy for Tribal Worldwide, told the Sky News that it the outage may be most likely an infrastructure issue and not another hacker attack.
"It's probably a physical infrastructure problem given the size of the outage, but it's hard to know at this stage," he said.
With Google affecting 40 percent of the global traffic, the incident also proves the market share the company has.
