Google Search started facing an outage beginning at approximately 8:50 PM ET on Tuesday. The outage reportedly affected more than 22,000 people at its peak according to website outage tracker Downdectector.com. However, Google appears to have fixed the issue, with the company reporting that its services were back online after a brief outage, with Downdetector showing only 324 reports as of 10:21 PM ET.
A majority of the affected users reported issues with Google Search only. Since Downdetector works by collecting users’ reports and graphing them over time, it’s possible that other company systems were impacted but not reported. Regardless, everything seems to be in order at the time of writing, for most users anyway.
If you tried searching anything during the outage, the results page will show various search cards People also ask, related tweets, videos and searchers and everything else that’s part of the usual Google search result interface. However, no actual search results would be displayed. Users were instead greeted with a ‘More Results’ button that did nothing when clicked.
Google claims that the issue was limited to the Americas and only affected the availability of results for some searches. That said, we don’t have any word on what might actually have caused the outage. It’s possible that amidst the heated AI search battle against Microsoft’s Bing, Google might be adding updates to its search engine to integrate BARD, its own AI chatbot rivalling the likes of ChatGPT and Bing Chat.Â
Users reported seeing weird and sometimes completely irrelevant search results during the outage on a Hacker News thread. While most users did confirm seeing the Google Search interface with no actual search results, some saw results that suggest that Google Search was more broken than down during the outage.
In the News: Netflix pulls the curtains on its DVD business; last one ships in September
