Search engine Google is back online after experiencing a brief worldwide outage that impacted
users from the U.S. and Canada to Singapore and Australia.
At the peak of the outage, more than 40,000 people in the U.S. reported that Google wasn’t
working. That figure dropped quickly as Google parent company Alphabet (GOOGL) swiftly
resolved the outage.
“We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon (August 8) Pacific
Time and briefly affected availability of Google Search and Maps, and we apologize for the
inconvenience,” Google said in a written statement.
Google was trending on Twitter due to the outage, with users using the hashtag #GoogleDown
in their online comments and communications.
Some people posted screenshots of error messages on Google. Other people joked about
trying to search on Google to check if the search engine was down.
Shares of Alphabet are down 19% year-to-date and trading at $117.30 U.S. per share. The
stock split on a 20-for-1 basis in July of this year.
