In what may be an unprecedented outage, all of Google's services briefly went dark about 4:52 on Friday afternoon Pacific time.
The outage, which reportedly affected most of Google's services worldwide, led to a staggering 40% drop in global Internet traffic (pageviews), according to analytics firm GoSquared (via Eric Mack of CNET).
The official downtime was between 1 and 5 minutes, according to Google.
One observer estimates that even this brief blip might have cost Google $500,000 in lost revenue. The impact on the rest of the digital economy was likely far greater.
In case you needed a reminder how powerful Google has become--and how much of the digital economy depends on it--this would be it.
Although this level of dominance is alarming, other companies offer most if not all of the services Google provides. If the company ever had a prolonged outage, Internet activity would likely recover quickly as companies and users switched to other services.
That said, the fact that one company touches this much of such a massive and important an industry is unsettling. Single points of failure and control concentrate power in the hands of a few. And they weaken the integrity of the entire system.