Google Services Go Down in Several Countries — What Went Wrong?

On Tuesday, Google experienced a brief outage. Users in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Singapore, and other countries reported problems with the search engine. Google Maps and Gmail were among the other services that were impacted.

Google Services Went Down Across the Globe

Over 40,000 poeple complained that Google wasn't working at its peak in the U.S. The number rapidly decreased and has been below 100 since around 2 a.m. ET, according to CNBC.

People who attempted to use Google Search were greeted with an error message rather than solutions and helpful links: "The server encountered an error and could not complete your request."

DownDetector, a website that tracks these service outages, reported that Google was experiencing issues.

Around 9:11 p.m. ET, reports of an outage began to arrive in DownDetector, reaching a peak 30 minutes later before subsiding, according to CNET.

Users have reported troubles with Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Images. Both depend on the search engine at Google to function.

The Outage Affected at Least 1,338 Servers

The Guardian reported at least 1,338 servers in more than 40 countries, including the U.S., Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Israel, parts of South America, Europe, and Asia, including China and Japan, were affected by the outage, according to network intelligence company ThousandEyes Inc.

A second blip occurred after the first interruption, which ThousandEyes recorded lasting 34 minutes. A smaller number of servers were impacted, and it took about seven minutes to fix.

Google is the most accessed website on the internet, garnering more than 80 billion visitors per month, The Guardian noted.

There Has Been a Fire at One of Google's Data Centers

CNET mentioned that a fire broke out at one of Google's 14 U.S. data centers in Iowa. Three electricians were critically injured at Google's data facility in Council Bluffs, Iowa, according to the local police. One suffered injuries severe enough to require air transportation to a nearby hospital.

Outage and the Fire Incident Is Unrelated

However, a Google spokesperson told CNET that there was no connection between the two occurrences.

"We're aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google Search and Maps, and we apologize for the inconvenience," said the Google spokesperson. "We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online."

Google Was Trending on Twitter

Twitter users briefly made Google trending topic by using the hashtag #GoogleDown.

While some displayed screenshots of error warnings, some joked about trying to check Google to see if the search engine was down.

As they turned to other search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo to access the internet, users tweeted their confusion.