Google Stays Quiet After Mystery Black-Out

Google has failed to address questions about a mystery black-out that cut internet traffic by an estimated 40% across the world.

All of the search engine's services - from Google Search to Gmail, YouTube and Google Drive - went down on Friday night in what technology experts called a "completely unprecedented event".

Three days on, Google is still refusing to offer any explanation.

The tech firm's representatives in the US and UK directed Sky News to its message on the Google Apps Dashboard.

All that reveals is that all of Google's services were hit and went down for between one and five minutes.

The US firm provided no details for what may have caused the disruption, which has caused much speculation on IT forums.

"Unfortunately beyond the information on our Apps Status Board we have nothing further to comment," a spokesman said.

The dashboard message said: "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 behaviour."

A later message added: "Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50% to 70% of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after four minutes."

Red dots on the Google Apps Dashboard show all its services were hit

According to web analytics firm GoSquared, global internet traffic fell by around 40% during the black-out, reflecting Google's massive grip on the web.

The outage cost Google an estimated $500,000 (£330,000) in the few minutes it was down. But industry observers said this would make a very small dent in Google's coffers or reputation.

"This money is very small compared with the $40bn (£25.6bn) annual revenue that Google generates," said technology news website TechNewsPlus.

"It is also estimated that the subsequent spike in traffic might have adjusted even this loss." 

Greg Sterling, a researcher with Sterling Market Intelligence, told The Financial Times: "This individual outage doesn't matter.

"The idea that Google could go down is unsettling to people but it doesn't create a problem for the company unless it starts to happen more frequently."

Analysts say the black-out was unlikely to have been caused by hacking, but say it cannot be ruled out. They think it was more likely to have been a physical infrastructure problem or human error.

Matt Oxley, head of creative technology at Tribal Worldwide, told Sky News: "To have a complete outage points to a single point of failure, but what are the single points of failure in a multi-national organisation such as Google?

"The simplest and most obvious would be the Domain Name System (DNS). Did someone manage to hack/attack their DNS? 

"Or did someone make a mistake and push an update (internal or external) that caused a cascading error through their name servers?

"The other possibility is they do actually have a single point of failure in their infrastructure that has been exposed either by external or internal circumstances (attack or mistake).

"If it was either of these cases then they won't want to publicise it before they fix the error. If it is the latter, then it could be embarrassing and damaging to their business/reputation."

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