Over 40% of the Internet traffic throughout the globe disappeared after Google suffered an outage last week. Although the downtime only lasted a few minutes, depending on the user’s location, all of the Google services, including YouTube, went down

Although the search giant hasn’t revealed the reasons for the outage, according to online analytics firm GoSquared, global online traffic fell almost twice during the downtime. Apparently, this figure can reflect Google’s control of the worldwide web. It is clear that for many users, the reliance on the tech giant is huge – just seconds after the outage, page views spiked shortly afterwards while users managed to get to their destination.

According to a message on the Google Apps Dashboard, all of its services were affected. Google admitted that it was aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. While people managed to access Gmail service, they were only seeing error messages or other unexpected behavior. In addition, Google itself only believes that 50% to 70% of requests to its services received errors – in other words, if the outage had really been total the figure could have been much worse.

Apparently, Google has a vested interest in preventing this happen again – in the 4 minutes of downtime it would have lost $500,000 in advertising. The experts claim that to face a problem that size there would have had to be a physical infrastructure problem. However, Google provided no comments on the issue, so it can be just a guess.