Google Outage Impacts Search, Maps

Although it didn’t even exist until 1998, the first place many of us go to look for any and all information today is typically Google Search. But on Monday night those who went to the search engine were left hanging. Google Search experienced an interruption of service on August 8.

For a short time, users could not search and ads could not be served. Downdetector.com first registered problems with Google at 9:12 pm EDT on Monday, and the internet site monitoring service registered over 45,000 users who confirmed the issue. The outage lasted about 30 minutes.

Instead of the search results they were looking for, users were served up a 500 server error, according to a report in The Guardian. The Guardian also noted that some users experienced issues with Gmail, Google maps, and Google images. However, the Google Workspace Status Dashboard noted no service interruptions for August 8.

“The server encountered an error and could not complete your request,” users were told.

Google acknowledged the issue, which was due to internal errors at the company.

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

The spokesperson did not provide additional details. The outage was unrelated to a separate incident at Google’s Council Bluffs, Iowa, data center on the same day. That incident sent three electricians to a local hospital, according to an SFGate report citing the Council Bluffs Police Department. That incident happened at just about 12 noon on Monday local time (10 am PT and 1 pm ET).

In the past 5 years, Google has invested more than $37 billion in offices and data centers in 26 states, and the company plans to invest approximately $9.5 billion in its US offices and data centers in 2022, according to Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, writing in a blog post in April.

Enterprise organizations’ pivots over the past few years have included bigger moves to the cloud. Analyst firm Omdia estimates that in 2019 about 25% of workloads were running in the cloud. When the pandemic hit, that number shot up to nearly 50%. Today it’s dropped back to about 44%, according to Roy Illsley, chief analyst for IT ecosystems and operations at Omdia.

CIOs have also been paying closer attention to their cloud resiliency plans and strategies.

What to Read Next:

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Lessons Learned from Recent Major Outages

Cyber Resiliency: How CIOs Can Prepare for a Cloud Outage