Google Outage Reduces Web Traffic by 5% May 15, 2009
InformationWeekreports that Internet traffic fell by 5% on Thursday morning because of Google's outage.
People did notice and complained loudly. Blog posts proclaimed Google's failure. Twitter jittered with tweets. Lattes languished undrunk on office desks as workers muddled through life without Gmail.
As a consequence of Google's problems, business Web sites that depended on services like Google Analytics took twice as long to load on average and were twice as likely to fail, according to Web infrastructure management company Gomez. And among online retailers, transactions took four times as long as usual to complete.
Google was quick to apologize. Senior VP of operations Urs Hoelzle explained the situation on the Official Google Blog. He said that a routing error had sent some of the company's Web traffic to Asia, causing a bottleneck that affected 14% of Google's users.
An entry here on Gomez says the outage caused a ripple effect that "was magnified when web sites automatically tried to re-establish connections with Google's services, causing further network congestion." Google's post explaining the error can be found here.
InformationWeek 
