UNITED STATES: Google search and the website temporarily stopped working for some users, causing uncertainty and a flood of jokes about what to do without the most widely used internet search engine in the world.
Around 9 p.m. users began to report service issues. A flood of requests began arriving at Downdetector on Monday at New York time, reaching over 40,000 requests an hour later. Downdetector is a US-focused outage-tracking service.
Although the services appeared to be sporadic, Taiwan and Japan also experienced issues loading the Google website and running searches.
Service interruptions of this type are uncommon because Google’s flagship product is renowned for its availability and dependability. Back-end web infrastructure is frequently blamed for such breakdowns, as was the case with Fastly and Amazon Web Services last year.
At just before 10 p.m. New York time, it looked that the service had been mostly restored.
According to local media claims, an electrical incident on Monday at a Google plant in Iowa resulted in the transport of three persons to a nearby hospital. It’s unclear if the episode is connected to the service interruption.
Alphabet’s spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this report. SFGate received the following statement from a spokesperson:
“We are aware of an electrical incident that occurred today at Google’s data centre in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Three people on site were injured and are currently receiving medical attention. We are closely collaborating with partners and local authorities to investigate the situation and provide assistance as necessary thoroughly. The health and safety of all workers are our utmost priority.”
Users mocked the outage and the unavailable Google search while it was happening on Twitter. On the platform, the phrase “google down” was trending. Check out some user tweets.
The majority of users had a 500 error, which denotes a server issue. Currently, most Indian consumers’ access to Google services appears to have been restored.
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