Google Air-Traffic Graph

Google recently blogged about the routing troubles they experienced a week ago when they incorrectly passed web traffic through Asia, which resulted in “traffic-jams”, slow services and interruptions.

The tone of the blog is appropriately balanced between contrition and humour and if I’d heard no more about it, I wouldn’t have thought twice. So it was with real interest that I stumbled across the following graph at Wired’s Epicenter which illustrates just how much data stopped moving.

If you’ve got any interest in data-visualisation, you’ve just gotta love this graph! That’s a drop of 15Gbps in about a minute…

But when you think about it more, it does get a bit scary. And I’m afraid it’s the usual concern – just how much data does Google own? As Epicenter say:

the fact that Google’s slip-up causes such a stir in the media, on mailing lists and on Twitter, says much more about Google’s centrality to the internet than this graph does, even though its a really cool graph.