Google has issued an apology for a software upgrade problem that resulted in a significant global outage on Tuesday, that affected several Google services.
A company representative stated that the team “worked fast” to fix the issue and that operations were once again 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 Maps,” they said.
“We apologise for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online.”
Users have been reporting issues with Google Explorer, the most popular search engine on the globe, starting at 2.12am BST (9.12pm EST, 11.12AM AEST), according to the real-time web site Downdetector. There were 4,113 verified reports of Google outages as of 11.38AM.
Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Images, according to users, are also having issues. Both depend on the search engine at Google to function.
At least 1,338 servers in more than 40 countries, including 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 about 12 o’clock, the initial disruption noted on ThousandEyes lasted roughly 34 minutes. It took about seven minutes to fix and only affected a small number of servers.
One error screen stated, “The server experienced a temporary issue and was unable to complete your request. Try again in 30 seconds, please. “
Users tweeted their confusion and switched to alternative search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo to browse the web.
Google, one of Safaricom’s local competitors, is the most frequented website on the internet, garnering more than 80 billion visitors per month, although exact traffic statistics are not disclosed.
