smlp.co.uk / CC BY 2.0

If you've ever doubted how big an impact Google has on the internet, think again. A two-minute outage from the search giant caused world net traffic to dip forty percent.

The event, which began at 23:52 BST, affected every single service Google offers -- including YouTube and Gmail. Everything went dark for between one and five minutes, but was back online by 23:57.


Web analytics company GoSquared saw a huge drop in pageviews as a result -- approximately 40 percent. The dip was followed by a spike up again, as users managed to reach their destination.

Google declined to comment on the problem, but the company's Apps Status Dashboard notes a service outage. "Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50 percent to 70 percent of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after 4 minutes," the company said.