Google goes down briefly in flash outage

Google's services were down for a few minutes yesterday, with the failure of search the most noticed. Twitter, as also the rest of the internet also seemed to have been affected by the flash outage.

The downtime, however, did leave measurable repercussions, analytics firm GoSquared said, adding that it caused a 40 per cent drop in global traffic during a five-minute window.

The brief hiatus in Google.com services lasted a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 British Summer Time, (BST) on 16 August 2013. The failure resulted in a slump in the number of pageviews coming into GoSquared's real-time monitor, of 40 per cent, which, according to commentators, was huge. The number of pageviews shot up shortly afterwards, with users able to get to their destination.

Google has acknowledged the outage, and added it had been resolved. A Google status page put the outage as lasting between 1 and 5 minutes.

In India, the outage was noticed around 4.20 am IST, lasting around 5 minutes, during which all Google services were disrupted. The web browser returned 502 error, when users attempted to access Gmail or Google Search.

Even as the outage lasted only a few minutes, it launched a flurry of tweets on Twitter.

"I wonder how many people checked their WiFi connection first before realising it was Google that was down," a Twitter user said.

Google's services dashboard displayed a pink dot in front of each offering, indicating that they were offline. A generic message popped up, confirming the outage each time a dot was clicked.

For instance, the tab for Gmail noted, "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. We will provide an update by 8/17/13 6:07 AM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.'' The incident lasted 1-5 minutes.

Around 10 minutes after the report of the outage, Google engineers notified on the dashboard that all problems had been resolved and the services were running fine.