Google outage: tech giant apologises after software update causes search engine to go down

Google has apologised for a software update issue that caused a major international outage on Tuesday.

The outage was quickly reported by technology platforms.

As of 11.38AM, there had been 4,113 confirmed reports of Google outages.

Network intelligence company ThousandEyes Inc reported Google outages were affecting at least 1,338 servers globally across more than 40 countries including the United States, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Israel, parts of South America, Europe and Asia including China and Japan.

The first outage reported on ThousandEyes lasted approximately 34 minutes before a second blip hit at around 12pm. It affected a smaller amount of servers and took around seven minutes to resolve.

Users attempting to use the search engine were met with a 502 or 500 error.

Users took to Twitter to express their confusion, reverting to alternate search engines including Bing and DuckDuckGo to surf the web.