According to the social media accounts of those who reported the outage of their Google applications, most turned to other competing search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo to surf the web in the meantime.
Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) owned Google, the world’s most used search engine, and recorded a server outage in the early hours of Tuesday morning after an initiated software upgrade. Thousands of users recorded the downtime according to DownDetector.com and the outage was promptly reported by major technology platforms.
At the peak of the Google search engine downtime, as many as 30,000 cases had been reported in the United States alone per Downdetector, which collates status reports from more than one source. According to Downdetector, as many as 5,900 users in Japan also witnessed the disruption while there were cases in Australia and Canada among other regions.
While the major problem was linked to the Google search engine, there were also cases of downtime with Google Maps, Google Photos, and Gmail, all sister apps that work with the search engine. Despite the outage now known across the globe, a Google spokesperson said the company’s engineers had worked quickly to resolve the issue and that services are now running back smoothly.
“We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google search and Maps,” they said. “We apologize for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online.”
According to some details shared by the affected users, an attempt to open the Google search engine leads to 500 or 502 error notifications.
“The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request,” one error page read. “Please try again in 30 seconds.”
According to the social media accounts of those who reported the outage of their Google applications, most turned to other competing search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo to surf the web in the meantime.
Google Outage: Occasional Trend with Tech Giants
Service disruption and outages such as the one the Google search engine recently experienced are somewhat common with big tech giants. While generally an occasional outage, the disruptions have been tagged as one of the key limitations of centralized servers.
Back in October last year, Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: META) recorded an outage on its flagship Facebook social media app. While the disruption was also swiftly resolved at the time, it shows no tech giant is truly immune to service disruptions, making the case for decentralized servers.
The pace of the emergence of decentralized servers has been very slow with adoption not as fast-paced as anticipated. However, the flaws inherent in centralized servers have been deemed to be a much better option when compared to their decentralized counterparts.
There has been quite an enormous count of data breaches on decentralized platforms this year alone, a trend that suggests the security architecture of the emerging technology still requires massive buildup and redesign before it can be fit for global adoption.
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