Why Google Faltered

As many know, Google went down last Thursday for almost two hours (7AM PST) which caused all of their main services (Gmail, Google.com, Google News, Google Reader and even YouTube) to go down.

The reason this is newsworthy besides it affecting 14% of Google’s entire customers is that it literally shows how strong Google is in representing the world wide web. In the graph below, you can see a dip in all internet traffic which is mind boggling.

The issue, according to Google’s blog, was they re-routed traffic to an Asian router which could not handle the traffic therefore causing a major outage affection millions of users. “An error in our systems caused us to direct some of our traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam… you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again,” states Google.