Google Briefly Nuked the Internet Last Night

Large swaths of U.S. internet users last night experienced a world without a search engine. According to new reports, the disruptions may have been caused by an electrical incident at a Council Bluffs, Iowa data center that left at least three electricians critical injured. The disruptions were caused by a software update.

Less than one hour after Downdetector started reporting accounts of the Google outage, the number of user reports had doubled to over 40,000. Thousands of people were unable to access search, or any of the other products that were disrupted. Users experienced issues with both images and email. Some users in Taiwan and Japan were affected by the search issues. Around two hours later, outage reports started to diminish.

The software update is what is blamed for the sudden disruptions.

There was a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected the availability of the search and maps service. We are sorry for the situation. Our services are back online after we fixed the issue.

Things get a bit hazy here. At least three electricians were in the hospital with critical injuries after a fire broke out in the Council Bluffs data center that was being operated on by the search engine company. According to SF Gate, the engineers were working on a transformer when an explosion occurred. One of the electricians was flown to a local hospital to be treated for his injuries, while the other two were taken to the hospital by ambulance. It is worth mentioning that the Council Bluffs data center is one of the largest of the company's 14 data centers spread across the US.

The incident was acknowledged in a statement sent to San Francisco Gate.

Three people are currently being treated for injuries they sustained in an electrical incident at the data center. The health and safety of all workers is our top priority and we are working closely with partners and local authorities to thoroughly investigate the situation.

Due to the company's obscene search engine market share stranglehold, any disruption to the search engine is a huge deal. According to researchers, between 61.7% and 98% of searches are conducted on the internet.