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Google servers go down for 5 minutes, web traffic falls 40 percent

For five minutes early on Saturday morning, the Internet stood still as all Google services including Gmail, Drive, Maps and Chat suffered an outage and didn't function.

The Google App Dashboard documented this brief outage as all apps provided by the search giant went down for around 5 minutes.

The app dashboard for Gmail had the following message for users:

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. 

A similar message was visible for all other apps that were down.

After Google returned to normal, internet traffic did as well and as CNET points out search engines like Yahoo! and Bing weren't able to capitalise on Google's outage, only highlighting our dependence on services Google provides.