Google had an outage from 10:15AM-12:15AM this morning affecting about 14% of their global users, which on any other web service might warrant a TechCrunch article or two, some gripes about uptime, and a bunch of #FAIL tags on Twitter.  Unfortunately, though, when you’re Google, your outages have a far bigger reach — even when it’s just a simple routing error, as it was this morning.  This diagram from Arbor Networks, whose servers are positioned at key NAPs and ISPs globally, portrays the impact:

Ouch.  Google accounts for about 5% of all internet traffic.  More importantly, it functions as many peoples’ gateway to their entire internet experience:  Mail, Browsing, and News.  Many people, when presented with an Error accessing Google, simply assume their connection is down and crawl under the desk waiting for the mushroom cloud..  apparently that’s what happened to the customers at these ISPs.  I’d hate to have worked in their customer service call centres this morning.