Last week's
Google outage may have slowed the rest of the world wide wibble to a crawl.
According to security outfit
Abornetworks, five percent of Internet traffic was lost for an hour and a half when
Google's network went down. Looking at the data, most large transit providers
appear to have been impacted. Part of the problem was that Google not only has
shedloads of traffic visiting its webpage, it also has its sticky hooks in loads
of other people's websites through its Adsense programme.
The net result was
that not only did five percent of the traffic disappear, but it also jammed the rest of the web slowed to
a crawl. In a recent official company blog post, Google said that an error in
one of its systems caused it to direct some of our web traffic through Asia,
which created a traffic jam. It claimed that only 14 per cent of its users
experienced slow services or even interruptions, although the Abornetworks
graphs seem to imply it was a lot worse.
It seems that the Internet has all
its network eggs in one basket and if you want to take out the web you should
blow up Google.