You may have noticed that on early Friday evening, Google went dark. The outage affected all of Google’s sites, crashing YouTube, Gmail and Search for a brief few minutes before the Internet giant could get everything back online. No big deal, right? We mean, people know how to get to a website by other means than just Googling it, right? Maybe not. The relatively brief blackout caused a 40 percent drop in global Internet traffic. After coming back online, web traffic saw a significant spike (as you can see on the graph below from GoSquared), meaning that instead of just hopping over to Bing or Yahoo to find what they were looking for, a major portion of the world’s plugged in population helplessly waited for Google to be restored …
