What Happens to the Internet When Google Goes Down?

Last week, the internet saw just how powerful Google really is. For five minutes on Friday, Google.com went down. While it was down the internet saw a 40 percent drop in traffic.

This statistic comes from GoSquared, an analytics company. They watched traffic to their sites plummet in those minutes and captured the drop for us all to see. While GoSquared probably doesn’t represent the entire internet (it’s possible that their sites relied on Google more than most), a drop that big is big enough to shake up site managers.

Of course, Twitter panicked as soon as the outage began. And when the service came back, a GoSquared registered a huge spike in traffic as people refreshed their sites. Who knows what might have happened had the outage lasted more than 5 minutes? Because, really, what does an internet without Google look like?

More from Smithsonian.com:

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Rose Eveleth | | READ MORE

Rose Eveleth was a writer for Smart News and a producer/designer/ science writer/ animator based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, Story Collider, TED-Ed and OnEarth.