Google has apologised for a software update issue that caused a major international outage on Tuesday.
A spokesperson for the company said the team had “worked quickly” to address the fault and services were back running as normal.
“We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google search and Maps,” they said.
“We apologise for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online.”
The outage was quickly reported by technology platforms.
The realtime online platform Downdetector reported users had registered problems with Google explorer, the world’s dominant search engine from 2.12am BST (9.12pm EDT, 11.12am AEST).
As of 2.38am BST, there had been 4,113 confirmed reports of Google outages.
User reports indicate Google is having problems since 9:12 PM EDT. https://t.co/MK35emuk7T RT if you're also having problems #Googledown
— Downdetector (@downdetector) August 9, 2022
Users said sister platforms Gmail, Google maps and Google images were also experiencing problems. Both rely on Google’s search engine to operate.
Hi Amanda. The Google Workspace Status dashboard (https://t.co/hWKKeG70F3) doesn't show any outages. Could you tell us more about what seems to be happening with your Gmail address? We'd be happy to help.
— Gmail (@gmail) August 9, 2022
Network intelligence company ThousandEyes Inc reported Google outages were affecting at least 1,338 servers globally across more than 40 countries including the United States, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Israel, parts of South America, Europe and Asia including China and Japan.
The first outage reported on ThousandEyes lasted approximately 34 minutes before a second blip hit at around 3am BST. It affected a smaller amount of servers and took around seven minutes to resolve.
Users attempting to use the search engine were met with a 502 or 500 error.
“The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request,” one error page read.
“Please try again in 30 seconds.”
Users took to Twitter to express their confusion, reverting to alternate search engines including Bing and DuckDuckGo to surf the web.
Never experienced a Google search outage before… 🤯 pic.twitter.com/5hksKw7hJp
— Rachael Piotrowski (@RachaelPiotPR) August 9, 2022
Google doesn’t release exact traffic numbers however it is the most visited website on the net, receiving more than 80bn visits per month.
Google is experiencing an outage so I am literally on bing dot com.
— Jesslyn 🇮🇩 (@jtannady) August 9, 2022
• This article was amended on 10 August 2022 to refer to 9.12pm EDT, rather than 9.12pm EST; and to use BST as the default time zone throughout.
