Google suffered a brief and rare outage on Friday when all of its services became inaccessible for up to five minutes, but analysts said the internet search company emerged without a meaningful dent to its revenues or reputation.
The last outage to affect Google on a similar scale occurred in 2009 – long enough ago for the blip on Friday to be registered as an isolated incident.
“This individual outage doesn’t really matter,” said Greg Sterling, a researcher with Sterling Market Intelligence. “The idea that Google could go down is unsettling to people, but it doesn’t create a problem for the company unless it starts to happen more frequently.”
One marketing executive estimated that the company suffered $500,000 of lost revenues during the minutes-long window. However, such a sum is relatively insignificant for a company that generates $40bn a year, and Mr Sterling said it was probably replaced in the spike of web activity that occurred once services were restored.
Google acknowledged the outage, which occurred late Friday afternoon on the US West Coast, with a chart that showed all of its services were affected – from Gmail to search and maps. The company provided no explanation for what may have caused the disruption.
Analysts were confident the outage was not the result of hackers, with several offering jokes on Twitter about the cause.
“Google went down because it was told it could no longer have 20 per cent time and didn’t like it,” wrote Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Land blog – referring to the time Google employees are given to work on projects outside their job description.
“Somebody in Mountain View probably unplugged something, then plugged it back in,” Mr Sterling said.
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