...probably some bot-net-master out there rubbing his hands together going 'ok, well that proves the cyber-weapon works... now time to find some paying customers :)'
If you're wondering how Google along can account for 40% of all internet traffic, the answer is YouTube. Video is well over half of traffic, and YouTube has the lion's share.
If you think about it, the one thing that connects all the tubes together is their addresses. If the postal service goes down, it doesn't matter how clearly you put the zip code on the envelope.
The DNS service was definitely down at the time. One of my co-workers was on a different network using different DNS servers from the rest of us who were on Google's public DNS servers. He had full connecvitity, the rest of us could only use services we had the IP addresses cached locally.
At which point all the traffic causes another outage so they can't reconnect, so they timeout for a fixed amount of time and then try back again all at the same time...
DNS lookup/ICMP was working for me, telnet port 80/443 was just timing out. A weird few minutes for sure. Makes me wonder is something happened with their load balancers. Very strange. Can't wait for more details.
I find it kind of disturbing how much effect it had on overall traffic. It makes me think, "What if Google did just drop off the face of the Earth?" How much of an effect would it have globally?
I think more people (meaning non-geeks, non-tech-savvy) would still think of Yahoo before Bing for search and Google-esque services wouldn't they? I know among my family and non-geek friends they would. Some still use Yahoo mail and Yahoo news.
But probably only for a short while, then we would see "damage being routed around."
But for a short while, it would probably appear a bit like those electrical outages back in 2003 and 1965, to name but a few. One failure/service overload leading to the next...
