Google apologises after software update causes search engine to go down

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 EST, 11.12AM AEST.

As of 11.38AM, 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.

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 12pm. 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.

Google doesn’t release exact traffic numbers however it is the most visited website on the net, receiving more than 80 billion visits per month.