Google has experienced numerous severe global outages since 2008, disrupting core services like Gmail, YouTube, and Search. One of the earliest major incidents occurred in February 2008 when Pakistan Telecom accidentally hijacked YouTube's IP address space, causing a two-hour worldwide outage. In August 2013, a five-minute outage of all Google services caused global internet traffic to drop by 40%, costing an estimated £330,000. A 25-minute outage in January 2014 affecting Gmail, Google+, Calendar, and Docs was traced to a software bug that generated an incorrect configuration, temporarily blocking user data requests. More recent outages in 2020 and 2022 hit YouTube, Gmail, Drive, Maps, and Search, with the December 2020 event affecting most services globally. These recurring failures—often caused by internal configuration errors or routing mistakes—highlight the fragility of relying on a single tech giant for essential internet infrastructure.