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| Google breaks down on the 31st of January 2009 - 50 minutes to go back to normal |
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| Big worldwide bug for Google, this Saturday 31st of January 2009: for about 50 minutes and following a technical problem due to human error, no web sites were accessible from the search engine leader… Needless to say that the internet usage was badly affected, below you can find details of Google’s black day. |
| Perimeter: |
- Study done the 31st of January 2009
- Cross-section of 32470 websites
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| At one point, Google only generated 10% of its normal traffic |
Saturday, January 31st 2009 and for over 50 minutes, Google has refused access to worldwide web sites, stating for each search result the following message: « this site might damage your computer ».
After two Egyptian pirates claimed responsibility for the bug, Google stated on its web site that it uses a security filter against badware (spyware, virus, intrusive ads), based on Stopbadware.org alerts. Then a human mistake happened during the filter update supposedly targeted at Google users. In fact all global web sites access was stopped when only suspicious sites were supposed to be stopped.
We have analysed below the direct consequences of this Google bug on the internet traffic. In order to do so, we have brought the number of visits coming from Google searches to 100 visits at 3:00 pm (just before the break down) on Saturday the 31st of January 2009, amongst sites audited by our AT Internet solutions.
In the below graph, we can see a real dip of the Google visits between 3:29 pm and 4:20 pm (CET) on Saturday the 31st of January 2009. Just as a reference, Google represents in normal time 90.5% of search engines access.
The start of the decline started from 3:29 pm to reach its lowest level between 3:59 pm and 4:10 pm:
- For 100 Google visits at 3 :00 pm on Saturday, January 31st 2009,
- 95 visits were recorded at 3 :29pm
- And only 9 visits at 3:59 pm, a drop of 90% of Google visits in 30 minutes!
Between 3:29 pm and 3:40 pm the traffic drop from Google is quick but progressive, probably thanks to visits made during this time but from Google results pages displayed before 3:29 pm.
The biggest drop happened during 3:40 pm and 4:11 pm, to then go back up from 4:12 pm and then be back to its before bug level at 4:21 pm with 99 recorded visits for 100 at 3:00 pm.
A very big problem for Google on Saturday, 31st of January 2009... A quite embarrassing bug from this world giant that has a quasi monopolistic position in various sensitive sectors.
It is worrisome to think that a simple human mistake could endanger the main Google activity that is supposed to be the most secure.
We just need to hope that Google will learn from its mistakes and will be able to fight against its own failure, or that the market really understands the limits of such a monopolistic situation...
We will come back on this subject very soon to analyse more in details its consequences on the web traffic.
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Methodology:
The study is based on the entire traffic generated by AT Internet audited sites at the time of recording, CET (GMT + 01:00) between 3:00 pm and 5:00 pm.
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