August 16, 2013 became a historic day in IT world after Google services suffered a complete blackout and global internet traffic dipped by 40% within five minutes.

All of the Google’s services including Google search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Analytics etc. went down for few minutes and left user wondering whether it’s an internet issue at their end or they just gone crazy.

As per leading news channels, Google has refused to provide any further information on why there was an outage, especially when giant like Google has servers around the world.

According to web analytics, firm GoSquared, a message on the Google Apps Dashboard showed all of its services are down. Message was “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 behavior”

Later, another message appeared, which read, “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.”

Digital expert Phil Dearson, head of strategy for Tribal Worldwide, said the blackout had cost Google an estimated $500,000 (£330,000) just in the few minutes it was down. As per him “This is completely unprecedented, I’ve never heard of anything like this before”.

While Google is working (possibly) on answering world about its blackout – it has also raised a debate on how important Google is for our day-to-day life and how it has wiped its competition.

It has shown the unpopularity of its competitors such as Bing and other search engines, which were unable to pick up the slack during the outage.

As of now, everyone has only few questions – What exactly happened and how all of a sudden giant like Google went into dark. Did we reach the edge of the internet? Do we have a life beyond Google?