Web analytics experts said the global internet traffic slumped by about 40% as the services offered by Google suffered an absolute blackout. Phil Dearson, Tribal Worldwide's head of strategy and digital expert, estimated Google's loss in revenue due to the blackout to be around USD500,000.

Google said the outage of all of the company's services lasted from one to five minutes last night. Gmail, Google Drive, Google Search and YouTube among others, went down. The reason behind the blackout was still unknown.

"That's huge," Simon Tabor, a developer from web analytics firm GoSquared, said while commenting about the 40% nose dive. "As internet users, our reliance on Google.com being up is huge. It's also of note that pageviews spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their destination."

"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 behaviour," a message on the Apps Dashboard of Google, said. "Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50% to 70% of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after four minutes."