It's happened before, at least once very early on:
Google had taken ill.
The problem was the index storing the contents of the web
in Google's servers. For a couple of months in early 2000,
it wasn't updating at all. Millions of documents created
during that period weren't being being collected. As far as
the Google search engine was concerned, they didn't exist.
http://books.google.com/books?id=V1u1f8sv3k8C&pg=PA41...