Twitter, #googlefail, and the viral misinterpretation of data

Some hay has already been made about this, but basically today for a couple of hours Google and all of its attendant services--search, Gmail, etc.--went down. And so on Twitter there were a flurry of messages tagged #googlefail that said something to the effect of, "Google's down!"

But a lot of the messages were re-Tweets of this:

@chr1sa : Graph of Internet traffic showing impact of this morning's #googlefail. Google practically IS the Internet: http://bit.ly/nICxj

However, these people totally misinterpreted the graph: it does not show all internet activity, but rather, it "shows average traffic from ten top North American ISPs sending data to Google’s network". So of course it's going to go down to virtually zero when Google's network is down.

And, really, wouldn't it be strange if all internet activity declined so drastically because Google went down? Why would people stop using the internet simply because they couldn't use their favorite search engine? Silliness.

(PS: Even though this post is about the internet, I'm not going to deploy the "internet icon", because of how incredibly stupid it is.)