Tens of thousands of internet users have been left unable to use Google services after the internet giant suffered an unexplained 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).
An error message displayed to some users read: “The server encountered an error and could not complete your request”.
Google has not yet issued a statement on the technical issues, which are understood to have affected users in multiple countries across the world.
Some frustrated internet users have taken to social media to vent their frustration at the service issues, while others took the opportunity to make jokes about how reliant they are on the Silicon Valley tech company’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”.
Separate reports online said an electrical explosion had occurred at a data centre in Iowa, United States, although no connection has been established between this incident and the outage.
The incident on Monday (August 8) left three people critically injured, according to the Council Bluffs Police Department.
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