Bangalore: Friday the 16^th ended with a massive technological realization. It was the day something went gravely wrong at the Google service center, Mountain View, California. Even though the service outage occurred for about one to five minutes, the impact it caused on the over-all internet traffic was incredibly massive.

In the brief two minutes that this incident took place, about 40% of the regular internet users from around the globe were under the assumption that the entire internet was down because none of Google’s applications from Google Search to Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Maps and Analytics appeared to be loading on any of the web browsers.

While some users went ahead and rechecked their Internet connection, others sat blankly and waited for Google to get back up its feet. The amazing fact is, except for a few percentage of users, majority of internet users never came to realize that it was only Google that was down while the other search engines like Yahoo and Bing were working perfectly fine.

According to the graph produced by GoSquared, a web analytics firm, between 4:37pm Pacific Time to 4:48 pm there was a clear dip in the over-all internet traffic by a shocking 40% during the brief time the Google services faced a black-out. Most of the tech veterans across the West Coast Area were baffled as they had a hard time figuring out what to do during this time. While a suggestion to use an alternative web browser was met with furrowed eye-brows, another question that was echoing across the West Coast was:”Can we go home then?”

Fortunately, a few minutes later, everything came back to normal and Google quickly resumed dominating the global internet traffic again. When the reporters from The Register contacted the people at Mountain View’s Google Inc, a spokesperson assured to fill them in with further information soon.

But what made a fine tech-giant like Google to blackout in this fashion can be anybody’s guess!