Google has apologized 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 fix the fault and services were back to normal.
“We are aware of a software update issue that occurred this afternoon Pacific time that briefly affected the availability of Google Search and Maps,” they said.
“We apologize for the inconvenience. We worked to resolve the issue quickly and our services are now back online.”
Tech platforms were quick to report the outage.
Online real-time platform Downdetector reported that users had reported problems with Google Explorer, the world’s dominant search engine, since 2.12am BST (9.12pm EST, 11.12am AEST).
As of 11:38 a.m., there had been 4,113 confirmed reports of Google outages.
Users said sister platforms Gmail, Google Maps and Google Images were also experiencing issues. Both rely on the Google search engine to function.
Hi Amanda Google Workspace Status Dashboard (not showing any interruptions. 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 firm ThousandEyes Inc reported that Google’s outages affected at least 1,338 servers worldwide in 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 to ThousandEyes lasted about 34 minutes before a second blip hit around 12 p.m. It affected a smaller amount of servers and took about seven minutes to resolve.
Users trying to use the search engine encountered a 502 or 500 error.
“The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request,” read an error page.
“Please try again in 30 seconds.”
Users took to Twitter to express their confusion, turning to alternative engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo to browse the web.
Google doesn’t release exact traffic figures, but it’s the most visited website on the web, with more than 80 billion hits a month.
Google is experiencing an outage so I’m literally on bing dot com.
— Jesslyn 🇮🇩 (@jtannady) August 9, 2022