What happens when the world's largest search engine experiences a five-minute outage? Apparently, a lot. That's exactly what happened on Friday when Google went down from about 3:52 p.m. to 3:57 p.m Pacific time. Some other services went offline as well, but the one that had everyone in a tizzy was search -- and rightfully so. The vast majority of Internet users rely on Google to get them where they want to go on the web every single day. However, the users were far from the only ones suffering during those dark five minutes.

In Q2 2013, Google reported revenues of $14.1 billion. Doing a bit of division, we can estimate that Google makes about $108,000 in revenue for everyone minute it's actually functioning. Five minutes of being offline cost the company about $545,000 in revenue, assuming that Google gets most of its revenue from the services that went down. For Google, it's not a huge amount of money, but that's roughly what the average American household brings in over the course of a decade.

Additionally, the downtime appears to have caused a global drop in website traffic of 40 percent before spiking back up again once Google was back online, according to GoSquared's analysis. This most likely didn't please website owners who rely on Google to get a decent amount of hits.

It's insane just how much we take Google for granted every day, but we sure do miss it when it's gone. Well, most of us.

Posted: Aug 17, 2013 9:39 pm
Related Forum: PC General Forum

Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/googles-5-minute-outage-means-545000-revenue-loss-40-drop-in-global-website-traffic