A few days ago on Saturday morning all Google services like Gmail, Youtube, Google search etc. were out. The internet suffered a lot because Google IS internet.
The Google App Dashboard documented this brief outage as all apps provided by the search giant went down for around 5 minutes.
The app dashboard for Gmail had the following message for users:
"We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior."
CNET reported that according to web analytics firm GoSquared, traffic on the internet dropped around 40 percent during those five minutes and perhaps only highlights the reliance of internet users on the search giant.
After Google returned to normal, internet traffic did as well and asCNET points out search engines like Yahoo! and Bing weren’t able to capitalise on Google’s outage, only highlighting our dependence on services Google provides.
Google hasn’t made any statement yet on what cause the outage.