Google went dark yesterday night after a software issue caused a brief outage that affected thousands of users around the world. We first noticed the outage at around 9.20 p.m. EST.
More than 40,000 people in the US also reported that Google was down for them, according to Downdetector.com. Users in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Singapore reported issues with Google.
There were 4,113 confirmed reports of Google outages as of 11.38 AM.
The issue went viral on social media with the hashtag GoogleDown trending. Some users joked about trying to check on Google to see if the popular search engine was down.
The outage was brief and Google was back online early Tuesday. In a statement, Google apologized and blamed the problem on a software update that occurred Monday afternoon and temporarily affected the availability of Google's Search and Maps services.
A search giant spokesman said the team had worked quickly to address the problem and services were back as normal.
They said that a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon at Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google search and Maps.
We apologize for the inconvenience. We worked quickly to address the issue and our services are now back online. There were more than 1,300 Google servers affected in 40 countries, including the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, Japan, China, and Singapore.