Google goes down for 5 minutes, web traffic takes a dive

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.

While the outage lasted just minutes, it caused a flurry of tweets on Twitter.

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

Around one hour later, GoSquared, a web analytics firm, said that it noticed a 40% dip in the pageviews.

"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," noted GoSquared. "That's huge. As internet users, our reliance on google.com being up is huge."

Google's services dashboard that monitors and shows the status of Google services had a pink dot in front of each one, indicating that they were offline for the said duration. Clicking on each dot, revealed a generic message confirming the outage.

For example, 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 ten minutes after the outage was reported, Google engineers added to the dashboard that all problems had been resolved and the services were running fine.