[mrcus]

Nope, especially considering the implications of this, with the amount of people working remotely. Google Meet, Classroom, etc. are down. This is probably literally costing billions every minute just in loss of productivity.

[ants_a]

Total world economic output is ~$150M / minute, so billions every minute is off by few orders of magnitude.

[tzs]

You are assuming that a minute of disruption can not cause more than a minute's loss of productivity. I don't think that assumption is justified.

Consider an exactly one minute outage that affects multiple things I use for work.

First, I may not immediately recognize that the outage is actually with some single service provider. If several things are out I'm probably going to suspect it is something on my end, or maybe with my ISP. I might spend several minutes thoroughly checking that possibility out, before noticing that whatever it was seems to have been resolved.

Second, even if I immediately recognize it for what it is and immediately notice when it ends it might take me several minutes to get back to where I was. Not everything is designed to automatically and transparently recover from disruptions, and so I might have had things in progress when the outage stuck that will need manual cleanup and restarting.

[rocho]

That figure seems way too low, what are your sources on it?

[yashap]

Indeed. Also, Google’s revenue is about $300K per minute. The value they provide is likely higher than that, but as you said, being able to send an email an hour later than you hoped it’s fine in most cases. Also, Google Search was fine, and that’s their highest impact product.

I’d guess actual losses to the world economy were more on the order of about $100K per minute, or about 1/3 of Google’s revenue. MAYBE a few hundred thousand per minute, though that seems unlikely with Search being unaffected, and everything else coming back. Certainly a far cry from billions per minute :)

[demosito666]

I never understood this type of calculation as it implies that time is directly converted into money. However, I struggle to come up with an example for this. Even the most trivial labor cases like producing paperclips don't seem to be directly converting time into profit: even you will make 10k units instead of 100k this hour, you don't sell them immediately. They bring revenue to the firm via a long chain of convoluted contracts (both legal and "transactional") which are very loosely coupled to the immediate output.

Nothing is operating at minute margins unless it's explicitly priced on a minutely basis, like a cloud service. Even if a worked on a conveyor belt can't produce paperclips without looking at Google Docs sheet all the time, this will be absorbed by the buffers down the line. And only if the worker will fail to meet her monthly target due to this, loss of revenue might occur. But in this case the service has to be down for weeks.

In case of more complex conversions of time into money, like in the most of intellectual work, this is even less obvious that short downtimes will cause any measurable harm.

[PeterStuer]

Besides the exaggerated figure, I always find these claims bizarre. Sure, there was some momentary loss, but aggregated over a month this will not even register.

[optimalsolver]

I was unable to watch the Mogwai - Autorock music video. :-(