Google Search suffers rare but brief outage Monday night

By Mike Murphy

Google’s search engine experienced a rare outage Monday night.

Google Search inquiries generated an error message for many people around the world, from the U.S. to the U.K. to Singapore, according to data from DownDetector .

Users saw either a 500 or 502 error message. “The server encountered an error and could not complete your request,” the message read.

Other users reported Google’s home page seemed to take longer to load. Other Google apps, such as Gmail and YouTube, did not appear to be affected.

According to DownDetector, the problem began around 9:09 p.m. Eastern, spiked around 9:40 p.m., and appeared to be largely resolved by 10:30 p.m.

“We’re aware of a software update issue that briefly affected availability of Google Search and Maps, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online,” a Google spokesperson said in an email late Monday night.

Google.com is the most-visited website on the internet, with more than 80 billion visits last month, according to data from Oberlo and SimilarWeb .

Earlier Monday, three electricians were injured by an “electrical incident” at a Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, according to a report by SFGate . Google confirmed that incident in an email to MarketWatch, and said it was unrelated to the later outage.

Share of Google parent Alphabet Inc. /zigman2/quotes/202490156/lastsale GOOGL -1.10% /zigman2/quotes/205453964/composite GOOG -0.96% were little changed Monday, and have fallen nearly 20% year to date, compared to the S&P 500’s /zigman2/quotes/210599714/realtime SPX -0.27% 13% decline in 2022.