Google has issued an apology for a software upgrade issue that resulted in a significant outage across the globe.
A company representative stated that the team “worked quickly” to fix the issue and that operations were again back to normal.
“We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected the availability of Google search and Google Maps. We apologise for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online,” the tech giant said.
Many technology platforms promptly reported the problem. Users of Google Explorer, the biggest search engine in the world, began reporting issues with it at 2.12 AM BST, according to the real-time website Downdetector.
There were 4,113 verified reports of Google outages as of 11:38 AM.
Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Images, according to users, also faced issues. Both depend on the Google search engine to function.
At least 1,338 servers in more than 40 countries, that comprise the United States, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Israel, parts of South America, Europe, and Asia, including China and Japan, were affected by Google outages, according to network intelligence company ThousandEyes Inc.
Before a second blip occurred at around 12 PM, the initial disruption reported on ThousandEyes lasted roughly 34 minutes. It took about seven minutes to fix and only affected a small number of servers.
Users encountered a 502 or 500 error when attempting to use the Google search engine.
“The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds,” one error page read.
Twitter users tweeted their confusion and switched to alternative search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo to browse the web.
Despite the steady growth of Bing and DuckDuckGo, Google is still the most frequented website on the internet, garnering more than 80 billion visitors per month, although exact traffic statistics are not disclosed.