It is strange even to write it. Yet yesterday, at 9.15pm – East Coast time -, Google went down for nearly an hour. They were well to report it 45,000 users from the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan, although DownDetector.com also reports some reports from Italy. Apparently, the problem was the search results not loading due to server errors. A situation that immediately returned to normal. But let’s try to understand what happened.
Google down for server errors
“We are aware of a software update issue that occurred in the late afternoon Pacific time that briefly affected the availability of Google Search and Maps, and we apologize for the inconvenience.” So said Google yesterday in a statement. “We worked to fix the problem quickly and now our services are back online.” For about an hour, in fact, the search engine malfunction was one of the most widespread trends on Twitter, with users making l’hashtag #GoogleDown popular within minutes.
As you can imagine, users complained about almost everything, as searches were blocked for at least an hour – despite the fact that in Italy it was really very late when the search engine started not working properly. Many users have shared screenshots of the error message returned by Google, others have made irony about the possibility of searching on Google because it was not working. And still others have joked that Twitter was the only lifeline in such a difficult situation.
Fortunately, the situation recovered within a short time. But everyone wondered how Google could go down so suddenly. And here comes a plausible answer from Twitter: to create problems could have been an accident that occurred days ago in Google’s data center in Iowa, where three employees were injured. For its part, now, Google has made it known that there is no correlation between the two episodes. What did it depend on, then? On the other hand, it is very rare that Google has problems with malfunctions. The search engine is practically a certainty. And we all know it well.