Total world economic output is ~$150M / minute, so billions every minute is off by few orders of magnitude.
Consider an exactly one minute outage that affects multiple things I use for work.
First, I may not immediately recognize that the outage is actually with some single service provider. If several things are out I'm probably going to suspect it is something on my end, or maybe with my ISP. I might spend several minutes thoroughly checking that possibility out, before noticing that whatever it was seems to have been resolved.
Second, even if I immediately recognize it for what it is and immediately notice when it ends it might take me several minutes to get back to where I was. Not everything is designed to automatically and transparently recover from disruptions, and so I might have had things in progress when the outage stuck that will need manual cleanup and restarting.
A billion is a number with two distinct definitions:
- 1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or 10^9, as defined on the short scale. This is now the meaning in both British and American English.
- 1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 10^12, as defined on the long scale. This is one thousand times larger than the short scale billion, and equivalent to the short scale trillion. This is the historical meaning in English and the current use in many non-English-speaking countries where billion and trillion 10^18 maintain their long scale definitions.
Nevertheless almost everyone uses 1B = 10^9 for technical discussions
https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/
World's GDP is $80,934,771,028,340 (nominal, 2017).
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2480%2C934%2C771%2C02...
$80.93477102834 trillion
Nobody would argue world GDP is anything billion, that's crazy.
In France, they use milliard and billion.
World GDP (via Google) $80,934,771,028,340
Minutes per year 365 * 24 * 60 = 525,600
Divide and you get 153,985,485
I’d guess actual losses to the world economy were more on the order of about $100K per minute, or about 1/3 of Google’s revenue. MAYBE a few hundred thousand per minute, though that seems unlikely with Search being unaffected, and everything else coming back. Certainly a far cry from billions per minute :)