Sky News reports that a recent outage of Google services lasted between one and five minutes, saying, “According to web analytics firm GoSquared, global internet traffic fell by around 40% during the black-out, reflecting Google’s massive grip on the web.”

The outage affected all Google services at the same time — Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Sites and several others — which is apparently a first. An expert who spoke with Sky News estimated that the outage may have cost Google $500,000 and guesses that the outage may have resulted from “a physical infrastructure problem given the size of the outage,” adding, “but it’s hard to know at this stage.”

Though the true cause of the outage isn’t known, Google’s App Status Dashboard reported the following, according to Sky News: “Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50% to 70% of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after four minutes.”

Google Outage: Internet Traffic Plunges 40% [Sky News]