SEO News You Can Use: August 8 Google Outage Affects Search Globally

Last week, Google’s Search and Maps services were severely disrupted by an outage on August 8. The outage, which lasted a little over 10 minutes, was caused by an electrical fire in Google’s data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. 

The fire started when an explosion occurred at a substation near the data center at approximately 11:59 pm CST. Three electricians working at the substation suffered severe burns in the explosion and have been hospitalized.

“We are aware of an electrical incident that took place today at Google’s data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, injuring three people on site who are now being treated. The health and safety of all workers is our absolute top priority, and we are working closely with partners and local authorities to thoroughly investigate the situation and provide assistance as needed,” said a Google spokesperson.

Users reported indexing complications, pages disappearing from the index and low quality or outdated search results, among others.

Although some areas reported continued troubles throughout the day on August 10, the issue appears to have mostly been resolved.

Gmail, Maps and Images search all had a temporary outage last Monday, according to Google users worldwide. However, Google has confirmed that the disruption was caused by a software update problem and had nothing to do with the events in Iowa.

Search Engine Journal reported that numerous users experienced disruptions in rankings, some of whom believed it to be the result of a ranking update. However, one issue not mentioned by most media channels was that many people were also experiencing indexing complications.

Google apologized and stated that a software upgrade was the cause of the unintended downtime.

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

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