Google have apologised after tens of thousands of internet users were left unable to use their services when a software update caused a mass outage.
Monitoring service Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports, said there were more than 40,000 incidents of people reporting issues with the world’s largest search engine early on Tuesday (August 9).
The issue saw an error message displayed to many users which read: “The server encountered an error and could not complete your request”.
Google later issued an apology for the widespread problems which they said had now been fixed, and explained that they had been caused by a software update on their systems.
A spokesperson told The Mirror: “We’re aware of a software update issue that briefly affected availability of Google Search and Maps, and we apologise for the inconvenience.
“We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online.”
In addition to the search engine, Gmail, Google maps and Google images were also said to be experiencing intermittent problems.
Some frustrated internet users took to social media to vent their frustration at the service issues, while others took the opportunity to crack jokes about how reliant they are on the Silicon Valley giant’s products.
One man on Twitter expressed his surprise at finding an error instead of his search results for the first time in his life, writing: “Had a Google search engine error for the first time ever.
“The engine was totally down. It’s so rare the first thing I did was come to Twitter to see if anything major is going on with the web.”
Another stunned user wrote “How is google down?! This is it, this is the apocalypse”, while one person chimed: “Google crashed but I can’t Google search why Google crashed”.
A more self-deprecating tweeter pointed out that they may struggle to find websites without using the search engine, saying that the outage “serves me right” for refusing to remember their URL addresses “because I can just Google them”.
An electrical explosion had occurred at a Google data centre in Iowa several hours before the outage, although no connection has been established between the two issues.
The incident on Monday (August 8) left three people critically injured, according to the Council Bluffs Police Department. (Mirror)