Arbor Networks knows more about the internet's workings than possibly anyone outside the National Security Agency. Their monitoring equipment sits in nearly all Tier 1 internet providers – and if you want data on what the internet looks like and what the top threats are, they've got it through their Atlas service.

So what does it look like when Google's search, email, and calendar services, among others, stop working for two hours?

The graph above from the company's Atlas system shows average traffic from ten top North American ISPs sending data to Google’s network. (Note this graph only shows traffic to to Google's portion of the internet, not internet traffic generally.) Google says it messed up and routed traffic through an Asian network that couldn't handle the flood. The outage lasted about two hours – starting about 10:15 am Eastern time.

If I were a regulator, this graph would be piece one in evidence that Google holds a monopoly on the world's information.

Update: Actually, the fact that Google's slip-up causes such a stir in the media, on mailing lists and on Twitter, says much more about Google's centrality to the internet than this graph does, even though its a really cool graph.

That drop on the right side of the graph from 15 Gbps to 1 is just astounding.

Image Courtesy Arbor Networks

via » The Great GoogleLapse · Security to the Core | Arbor Networks Security.