Google go down and 40 percent web traffic fall in 5 minutes

Google's services, including the popular Google Search, suffered a rare outage on early Saturday morning. The outage was noticed around 4.20am IST and lasted for around 5 minutes. All Google services were disrupted. If a user tried to access Gmail or Google Search, the web browser returned 502 error.

The Google App Dashboard documented this brief outage as all apps provided by the search giant went down for around 5 minutes.

The app dashboard for Gmail had the following message for users:

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.

A similar message was visible for all other apps that were down.

CNET reported that according to web analytics firm GoSquared, traffic on the internet dropped around 40 percent during those five minutes and perhaps only highlights the reliance of internet users on the search giant.

After Google returned to normal, internet traffic did as well and as CNET points out search engines like Yahoo! and Bing weren’t able to capitalise on Google’s outage, only highlighting our dependence on services Google provides.