Google Search witnesses massive outage, affects tens of thousands of users

The most common causes of such failures are back-end web infrastructure, such as those experienced by Fastly and Amazon Web Services last year

Alphabet Inc.’s Google search and website temporarily stopped working for some users, setting off confusion and a torrent of memes about what to do without the world’s most popular online engine.

User reports of issues with the service began inundating Downdetector, an outage-tracking service focused on the US, from around 9 p.m. New York time on Monday and numbered more than 40,000 an hour later. Problems loading the Google website and performing searches were also observed in Taiwan and Japan, though the services appeared to be intermittently available.

Google’s signature product is known for its ubiquity and reliability and service