Plusnet has revealed its broadband network saw a slump in traffic last Friday night (August 16th 2013) as Google services were briefly hit by a major global outage.

The issue, which affected everything from search functionality to YouTube, only lasted for around five minutes but had a significant impact on data usage across the world, with real-time analytics provider GoSquared revealing that worldwide traffic fell by around 40 per cent.

Although Plusnet said the effect was probably not so dramatic in the UK as the outage occurred in the early hours of the morning, a noticeable blip can still be seen in one of the company's Google peering links, with traffic taking almost half an hour to return to normal levels.

On an average evening, around 20 to 25 per cent of the internet service provider's traffic comes from Google, with YouTube accounting for the bulk of this.

Dave Tomlinson of Plusnet commented: "[It] makes you wonder what would happen if Google disappeared for longer. You couldn't even Google for search engines to find another search engine."

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