Google Search Suffers Short Outage

Google search suffered a short outage Friday morning, as Independence Day started in the US, and the giant began omitting results form searches by European users under the so-called “right to be forgotten”.

The internal server issues started on Friday morning and delivered an error message, as search services could not be accessed. Other services such as Gmail, Docs, and Google+ were unaffected. The issue lasted for around fifteen minutes  and appears to be fixed now.

End of the world

For some minutes Twitter was alive with reports of the end of days, as Google.com and other country’s sites were unavailable.

“Why is Google down?” became the top search query on the Microsoft search engine, and Tweets said  “This is Bing‘s time to shine” – more or less seriously.

The main website gave a “500” error, adding “the server encountered an error and could not complete your request”. It was reported in multiple countries, and may well have been worldwide, although for many of our colleagues it was too brief to be noticed.

The mobile search site was not affected.

Google’s services have been very reliable of late, with outages rare and short-lived.  A major blackout in January, which affected Gmail and other applications but only for around an hour. Gmail suffered delays of several hours in September 2013, which Google blamed on a problem in software sending incorrect configurations to servers.

Some users claimed that Google searches have shown brief gaps and delays in recent weeks, although these are often hard to distinguish from problems in access networks or Wi-Fi connections.

Google has not yet issued any statement or explanation.

Do you know search engines?