Google goes dark for 2 minutes | Hacker News Reader

Google goes dark for 2 minutes

theregister.co.uk

68 pointsx1sc025 comments

As usual, The Onion predicted this (almost): http://www.theonion.com/video/google-shuts-down-gmail-for-tw...

I was just going to say this article read like an onion story...

...probably some bot-net-master out there rubbing his hands together going 'ok, well that proves the cyber-weapon works... now time to find some paying customers :)'

Deleted comment

Listing google as a previous employer in your profile makes me worried there could be something legitimate behind the joke.

Fair point, joke removed.

If you're wondering how Google along can account for 40% of all internet traffic, the answer is YouTube. Video is well over half of traffic, and YouTube has the lion's share.

Can someone tell me, technically, how every service Google has to offer can simultaneously be blacked out?

I'm guessing it had something to do with DNS.

If you think about it, the one thing that connects all the tubes together is their addresses. If the postal service goes down, it doesn't matter how clearly you put the zip code on the envelope.

The DNS service was definitely down at the time. One of my co-workers was on a different network using different DNS servers from the rest of us who were on Google's public DNS servers. He had full connecvitity, the rest of us could only use services we had the IP addresses cached locally.

My speculation is their fancy SDN backbone. If that gets fubared, everything goes away.

What I find amazing is google recovered so quickly. Extended outages are often caused by the horde of systems all attempting to reconnect at once.

At which point all the traffic causes another outage so they can't reconnect, so they timeout for a fixed amount of time and then try back again all at the same time...

I find it kind of disturbing how much effect it had on overall traffic. It makes me think, "What if Google did just drop off the face of the Earth?" How much of an effect would it have globally?

...Or am I just reading too far into it?

Reading too much into it. Users would adapt, moving to other services and traffic volumes would return to approximately "normal" levels.

it's actually an interesting scenario. Let's say Google search went away. What services would people flock to, and would they be able to stay up?

I guess Bing is the next closest, and it would probably go down.

I think more people (meaning non-geeks, non-tech-savvy) would still think of Yahoo before Bing for search and Google-esque services wouldn't they? I know among my family and non-geek friends they would. Some still use Yahoo mail and Yahoo news.

But probably only for a short while, then we would see "damage being routed around."

But for a short while, it would probably appear a bit like those electrical outages back in 2003 and 1965, to name but a few. One failure/service overload leading to the next...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965

But also consider all the Gmail addresses and email that would be lost. I'm sure most Gmail users do not back up their Gmail locally.

I believe it was time travel; possibly an irate developer trying to get back his 20% time.

DNS lookup/ICMP was working for me, telnet port 80/443 was just timing out. A weird few minutes for sure. Makes me wonder is something happened with their load balancers. Very strange. Can't wait for more details.

Internet Kill Switch? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/internet-kill-switch-obam...

I was watching ping www.google.com when it came back to life! now I know it was a real outage and not that crappy hub in my nortel.

Looks like DNS issue. Intersting read http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2013/a-single-kill-switch-for-...

Maybe Google thought it was Earth Hour for two minutes?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com