Upon updating its search engine, Google caused an international outage, for which the tech giant apologized.

 A spokesperson for the company said that Google's team had "worked quickly" to address the issue, and that services were running back to normal. 

“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.”

Tech platforms quickly reported on the outage, including Downdetector, a real-time online platform that reported users had registered problems with Google at 2:12 am BST. 

Until 11:38 am, there had been 4,113 confirmed Google outage reports.

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Users have also been complaining that Gmail, Google maps, and Google images have also been experiencing problems. 

ThousandEyes, a network intelligence company, reported Google outages affected at least 1,228 servers across the planet in over 40 countries, including the United States, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, some parts of South America, Europe, and Asia including China, and Japan.

The first outage, according to ThousandEyes, lasted around 34 minutes before the second outage around 12:00 pm. 

Users looking to use Google experienced a 502 or 500 error. 

“The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request,” one error page read.

“Please try again in 30 seconds.”

Users expressed their confusion on Twitter, some even refuging to Bing to do some research.

Google receives 80 billion visits a month, making it the world's most used search engine. 

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