Google outage affects over 41,000 users; services now back
Alphabet Inc's Google suite of services faced a brief outage on Tuesday, i.e., August 9, at around 6:37 am (IST). The outage lasted for around an hour, and the services are now back up. Users were affected in several countries, including the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Kenya, and India. The global disruption reportedly took place because of a software update issue.
Why does this story matter?
The latest Google outage affected a minimum of 1,338 servers across more than 40 countries. This proves this was not some isolated incident. Google's search engine is the world's most visited website globally, with over 80 billion visits every month. In our modern tech-savvy world, a disruption like this has the potential to bring work to a standstill.
What services were affected?
Users were facing difficulty in accessing Google Maps, YouTube, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Duo. Even the search engine threw up an error. The problems began at roughly 6:37 am and continued to rise to the peak at around 7:07 am. Finally, by 7:22 am, the affected services began returning to normal. The figures were monitored by the outage tracking platform Downdetector.
What did the error message say?
Whenever a service was accessed, an error message was shown on the screen. It said, "500. That's an error. The server encountered an error and could not complete your request." The text also urged users to report the issue and mention this message in it.
How many people were affected?
At the peak of the disruption, over 41,000 complaints were reportedly received. This includes 30,000 reports in the United States alone and 5,900 in Japan. The number of affected users in India is currently unknown. This is not the first instance of Google services going down in 2022. In March, Google Cloud faced an error for two hours and 35 minutes.
Services are now back online, says Google
The company has released a statement apologizing for the outage and said that the services are now running normally. "We're aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google Search and Maps." "We apologize for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online," it added.
