If you tried to search something on Google this morning, you very likely failed in perhaps the most simplest of those internet endeavours. Fret not, since you are not walking alone. Thousands of fellow users across the globe ran into similar problems as several Google services experienced a massive outage on Tuesday morning.
This is a surprising development, given that Google is not one to usually suffer outages. This follows the global outage suffered by several Microsoft 365 apps, including MS Teams and Outlook, a few weeks ago because of a recent deployment that contained a “broken connection to an internal storage service.”
The current (and major) outage was responsible for taking down not just Google Search, but related Google services such as Photos, YouTube, Maps, Drive, and others. Downdetector, the popular outage detecting platform, informed that users have been encountering problems with Google since 6:42 PM IST.
If you tried to use Google Search today, you have likely seen this message prompt, “500. That’s an error. The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds. That’s all we know.”
Thankfully, it seems to be resolved now, and Google’s services are once again up and working.
Google did not inform why the major and unexpected outage occurred, but another message indicates that it is an issue with the servers. The second message read “We are sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue. Please try again later.”
According to Downdetector, users reporting issues with Google reached its peak at 7:01 AM on Tuesday morning with 41,043 reports. Most problems were encountered with Google’s search engine (81%), while 18% of reports denoted problems with Google’s website. 1% of reports covered problems users encountered during logins.
According to network intelligence firm ThousandEyes, the Google outage affected at least 1,338 servers across more than 40 countries. This includes the US, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Israel, parts of South America, Europe and Asia including China and Japan.
After encountering issues with Google Search, users went to the place they usually go when they run into such problems – social media (or more specifically, Twitter). The hashtag #GoogleDown trended on Twitter as users posted complaints and memes all across the platform.
Google showing error for first time. This day will be remembered 😀#google #error #googledown pic.twitter.com/779jOhJxva
— Ganesh Mallya (@hgmallya) August 9, 2022
