Google down for almost an hour - DNS probs or hacked?

Yesterday was one of those historical moments with an event that doesn't happen a lot: a major worldwide outage of Google.

The company says it was offline for only 15 minutes, during 6:45 and 7:00 PM Eastern time. But this is false. Me and several other users from webboards confirm the accessibility problems lasted for almost an hour.

The official statement from Google is that the problems were caused by DNS problems, and not by security or hacking issues like some sites reported. I think DNS problems are the most logical explanation as Google's data centers were accessible by typing in the IP address.

Some reports state that Google got hacked because some people were redirected to SoGoSearch.com or other pages. But this was caused by typical browsers behaviour and not because Google got hacked: when a domain isn't accessible the browser tries to guess and so it might reach Google.com.net, a domain which belongs to SoGoSearch.

Google's advertising network was also down for almost an hour. During Q1 2005 the company's advertising revenue accounted for $1,245 million. Traffic on the web is a little bit lower on Saturdays and Google's advertising revenue probably faced another fierce growth in the second quarter of the year but that doesn't hold me back to make a quick calculation about how much revenue loss the downtime might have caused for Google.

A quick calculation reveals that a one hour downtime on Saturday probably causes the company to receive about $400,000 less advertising revenue. (just a quick calculation, likely not totally accurate). If we take 15 minutes of downtime then it still accounts for more than $100,000 less advertising revenue.

Downtimes for major companies aren't cheap ;-)