The importance of Google to the smooth running of the Internet was demonstrated late Friday (Australian time), when Google’s search engine and all its apps stopped working.

All Google apps on the Google Apps Status Dashboard displayed the same message:

“We're aware of a problem with [app name] affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access [app name], but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour. We will provide an update by 8/17/13 10:37 AM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. The incident lasted 1-5 minutes.”

The messages are date stamped 8/17/13 9:37 AM, which is 4:37pm AEST on Friday. Another message 11 minutes later another message said “service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after 4 minutes.”

The incident has been widely reported around the world. Many news organisations have attempted to get a comment from Google on the reasons for the outage, but have been unsuccessful. Web analytics company GoSquare said the glitch caused a brief 40% drop in global Internet traffic:

“Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 BST on 16 August 2013. This had a huge effect in the number of pageviews coming into GoSquared’s real-time tracking – around a 40% drop. That’s huge. 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.”

The outage has caused major ripples around the blogosphere as speculation rises as the cause. Google’s refusal to comment has only added fuel to the fire.