

Google goes dark for 2 minutes - x1sc0
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/17/google_outage/

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codeka
As usual, The Onion predicted this (almost):
[http://www.theonion.com/video/google-shuts-down-gmail-for-
tw...](http://www.theonion.com/video/google-shuts-down-gmail-for-two-hours-to-
show-its,27610/)

~~~
darkchasma
I was just going to say this article read like an onion story...

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rbourke
...probably some bot-net-master out there rubbing his hands together going
'ok, well that proves the cyber-weapon works... now time to find some paying
customers :)'

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kps
If you're wondering how Google along can account for 40% of all internet
traffic, the answer is YouTube. Video is well over half of traffic, and
YouTube has the lion's share.

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pdog
Can someone tell me, technically, how _every_ service Google has to offer can
simultaneously be blacked out?

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eksith
I'm guessing it had something to do with DNS.

If you think about it, the one thing that connects all the tubes together is
their addresses. If the postal service goes down, it doesn't matter how
clearly you put the zip code on the envelope.

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gorbachev
The DNS service was definitely down at the time. One of my co-workers was on a
different network using different DNS servers from the rest of us who were on
Google's public DNS servers. He had full connecvitity, the rest of us could
only use services we had the IP addresses cached locally.

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ffk
What I find amazing is google recovered so quickly. Extended outages are often
caused by the horde of systems all attempting to reconnect at once.

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InclinedPlane
At which point all the traffic causes another outage so they can't reconnect,
so they timeout for a fixed amount of time and then try back again all at the
same time...

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Posibyte
I find it kind of disturbing how much effect it had on overall traffic. It
makes me think, "What if Google did just drop off the face of the Earth?" How
much of an effect would it have globally?

...Or am I just reading too far into it?

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orofino
Reading too much into it. Users would adapt, moving to other services and
traffic volumes would return to approximately "normal" levels.

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arn
it's actually an interesting scenario. Let's say Google search went away.
What services would people flock to, and would they be able to stay up?

I guess Bing is the next closest, and it would probably go down.

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Andrenid
I think more people (meaning non-geeks, non-tech-savvy) would still think of
Yahoo before Bing for search and Google-esque services wouldn't they? I know
among my family and non-geek friends they would. Some still use Yahoo mail and
Yahoo news.

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ceautery
I believe it was time travel; possibly an irate developer trying to get back
his 20% time.

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dmourati
DNS lookup/ICMP was working for me, telnet port 80/443 was just timing out. A
weird few minutes for sure. Makes me wonder is something happened with their
load balancers. Very strange. Can't wait for more details.

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pyre
Internet Kill Switch? [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/internet-kill-
switch-obam...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/internet-kill-switch-obama)

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K2h
I was watching ping www.google.com when it came back to life! now I know it
was a real outage and not that crappy hub in my nortel.

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wowfat
Looks like DNS issue. Intersting read
[http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2013/a-single-kill-switch-
for-...](http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2013/a-single-kill-switch-for-90-of-
the-top-ten-websites/)

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magnacartic
Maybe Google thought it was Earth Hour for two minutes?

