Google crash led to 5 percent drop in internet traffic

May 18, 2009

Web surfers may have noticed something strange last Thursday if they tried to use the popular Google search engine. For about an hour Thursday morning, many users found Google wasn't working.

What Google termed a "traffic jam" resulted in slow or interrupted service for about 14 percent of users, the company said. Other services, including Google's webmail service Gmail, YouTube and Google News were also disrupted.

The service disruption at Google also had a ripple effect on the rest of the web, causing a 5 percent drop in internet traffic, according to InformationWeek.

Websites for online retailers took four times as long as usual to complete sales transactions, according to a web infrastructure management company, InformationWeek reported.

The lack of access to one of the web's most popular sites left many users complaining loudly on services like Twitter. People seem to expect their high speed internet to be just that.

Google's dominance of web searches is underscored by data from comScore that found 64 percent of searches conducted in the month of April were on Google sites.

About 20 percent of searches were on Yahoo sites while the number three search engine company, Microsoft, had just 8.2 percent.

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