Google having server issues tonight

[Brett_Tabke]

[9to5google.com...]

This evening, users across the United States began experiencing issues with Google Search, with confirmed reports of errors and long loading times on both the east and west coast. According to DownDetector, the increase in reported issues began at approximately 6pm PT before spiking at around 6:30pm.

Those affected by the issue would sometimes be shown a 500 Internal Error or 502 Error when trying to perform a search. Even Google’s homepage (Google.com) seemed to be taking longer to load. Notably, other Google services like Gmail, the Play Store and YouTube do not seem to be affected at the moment.

[westcoast]

Woooah... SERPs seem bugged as heck too.

Major traffic pages from my site have dropped out of the index over the last few hours entirely.

Even getting to this forum was difficult. I usually google "google seo forum" to get here, usually ranked 1 or 2. This site has dropped to the bottom of the page.

[martinibuster]

SERPs are a bit unhinged. I've had trouble finding things tonight.

[HereWeGo123]

Yeah, the SERPs are very very odd. Not your conventional “shuffling” or updates. top tier authority giants have vanished for some keywords as well. This is an obvious glitch -- maybe something similar to what happened in August 2020 (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-was-glitch-bug-29923.html)

[robzilla]

[omaha.com...]

[engine]

Oh dear, that's very sad for the people injured, and I hope they recover quickly, and without lasting problems.

[phranque]

seems like the fire occurred 7 hours before the outage...

[JesterMagic]

Is everything fixed? Didn't notice any errors or ranking issues last night or this morning here in Canada (not that I was really looking at my keywords last night)

[Brett_Tabke]

[financialexpress.com...]

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Google says it was a problem with a software update, I'm sure it was, but what's going on in the Iowa data center?

According to Appleinsider the problem may have been a fire at their Iowa data center, though Google has since called that unrelated. - [appleinsider.com...]

SFGate reports that the Iowa data center incident had to do with a major electrical issue that sent three electricans to the hospital. It sounds pretty serious. [sfgate.com...]

Whatever the cause, it's a good reminder not to ignore other potential sources of traffic.