The fact that the Internet users worldwide and other Web sites depend quite heavily on Google is more than evident from the fact that Thursday's service disruption at the company resulted in 5 percent fall in Internet traffic, as per the statistics provided by Craig Labovitz of Arbor Networks.

In a Web traffic graph posted by Labovitz, the glitch struck between 10:15 a. m. and 12:15 p. m. Eastern Daylight Time, and affected traffic across 10 tier-one and tier-two Internet service providers.

Acknowledging that 'failures happen,' Labovitz added: "But if you happen to be Google and your content constitutes up to 5% of all Internet traffic, people notice. Network engineers around the world frantically e-mail traceroutes to mailing lists. IRC channels fill with speculation. And end users Twitter a lot."

And, in fact, the service failure was more than noticed! Web infrastructure management company Gomez noted that business Web sites depending on services like Google Analytics took twice the time they take for loading. Online retailers took four times more the time they usually take for completing their transactions.

However, Google did not take long to apologize. Explaining the circumstances, Urs Hoelzle - Senior VP, Operations - said it was due to a routing error that part of Google's Web traffic was sent to Asia, thereby resulting in a holdup that affected 14 percent users.