Google’s DNS service (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) went down very briefly today at 11:29am GMT. This took down Google.com at the same time – preventing website domains from being resolved and users from searching for information. Because of this, there was a noticeable drop in the number of pageviews coming into GoSquared’s real-time tracking.
It looks as if the outage was limited to a specific region and was resolved very quickly. We noticed a 4.7% drop in traffic (pageviews being tracked) at 11.29. Over two years ago, Google DNS was serving over 70 billion requests per day, so just one minute of downtime would mean 49 million failed requests.
Although 4.7% is significant, it’s nothing compared to the huge 40% drop we reported in August last year.
Google DNS launched in December 2009 to improve the speed and security of DNS. You can read more about the project here.
