Google Shuts Down for 5 Minutes and the Internet Disappears

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
by Kiri Blakeley 4 hours ago

Imagine that the world's only map gets lost. Or the computer that controls every single traffic light in the world goes down. Now you have somewhat of a vision of what happened when -- zoinks! -- Google went down on Friday!!! During the five minutes that Google search went dark, there was a 40 percent drop in global traffic! In other words, we all sat there with our fingertips hovering over the keyboard ... totally ... LOST.

Says Internet traffic analytics firm GoSquared:

Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 BST on 16th August 2013. This had a huge effect in the number of pageviews coming into GoSquared's real-time tracking -- around a 40% drop, as this graph of our global pageviews per minute shows. That's huge. 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.

OMG. Well, I personally didn't notice it, it must have happened during one of my brief lulls during the day when I'm actually NOT using Google. Hey, I've tried other search engines. They suck.

Most of us keep the sites we traffic frequently in our browser and they pop up automatically or we find them in our bookmarks. But if we're looking for, say, "Greek restaurant Smith Street" or "places that sell monkeys NYC" or looking for a news story or recipe or the weather or even doing a little ex stalking, where do you go? Google!!

I'm sure if Google ever shut down permanently, we'd all slowly crawl out of our dark corners and blindly feel along the sides of the Internet until we eventually stumbled upon what we were looking for. But we've all become hopelessly reliant on Google. No wonder the government is watching it! (Supposedly.)

I'm an early Google adapter. A relative of mine suggested it to me over a decade ago, when everyone was still using Yahoo search. I couldn't believe how much easier it was. It took the rest of the world about five years to catch on.

But now we all can't imagine life without Google the same way we can't imagine going back to pay phones or vinyl albums. Can you fathom actually having to, like, go to the phone book to find a place? Does anyone even have one of those things anymore?!

Google, we're counting on you. Don't let that happen again, 'kay? PLEASE?! For the love of God, Google!! ARE YOU LISTENING??!!

Do you ever worry about what would happen if Google goes down?

Image via iStock

?