Google Search and Maps take a brief time out

I remember it like it was yesterday but it wasn’t. It was actually the day before yesterday and I was sitting on the couch doing a little research for my latest passion project, SmokeInsider. While looking for the best way to cook hard-boiled eggs on a pellet smoker, my search was abruptly interrupted by an error similar to the one you see below.

Assuming that the internet just wanted me to do something else, I moved on to other tasks and didn’t give it a second thought. Then, Michael dropped a message in the company discord asking if anyone was having issues with Google Search. Apparently, we were not alone. Around 9:00 PM EST, more than 40,000 users headed to downdetector.com to report similar issues that were affecting not only Google Search but also Google Maps. In a strange but reportedly unrelated incident, reports began circulating that an explosion damaged a Google data center in Council Bluffs resulting in injury of three people at the facility.

We are aware of an electrical incident that took place today at Google’s data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, injuring three people onsite who are now being treated. The health and safety of all workers is our absolute top priority, and we are working closely with partners and local authorities to thoroughly investigate the situation and provide assistance as needed.

In an email response to Gizmodo, Google acknowledged the incident at Council Bluffs but denied any relation to the search outage. Google’s official stance contributes the outage to an issue with a software update and goes on to say that the services are now fully restored.

We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google search and Maps,” Google said in a statement. “We apologize for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online.

Google via Gizmodo

In related news, some website owners have reported indexing issues with recently published pages. Google’s search guru John Mueller responded on Twitter that while he wasn’t aware of any specific issues, the plausible impact on site indexing should iron itself out shortly. If you are a website owner, it would be a good idea to keep an eye on the search console for any abnormalities or pages not indexed.