Google Search Is Very Broken Now: Outages, Indexing Issues, Pages Missing & More

Aug 9, 2022 - 6:35 am 147 by

Google Broken

Last night, Google suffered a pretty big outage with Google Search that is still lingering through this morning. It seemed to be larger than just an outage because there are tons of complaints about indexing issues, pages dropping out of the index, and super poor quality and dated search results being shown in Google this morning.

The first report I saw of the outage was from 9to5Google last night at around 9:30 pm ET, I tweeted about it then:

There was a Google data center fire that seemed to have caused these issues. A Google spokesperson said "We are aware of an electrical incident that took place today at Google’s data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, injuring three people onsite 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."

Those injured should be in our thoughts and prayers and have a speedy recovery.

The outages looked like this to many searchers, although I did not see it myself:

But the outage seemed to have impacted more than just accessibility to Google.com and the Google Search results.

There are tons and tons of complaints about indexing issues and old pages that once ranked, not ranking anymore. Here are just some of those complaints:

Google is aware and John Mueller of Google thinks things will soon start to fix itself as Google recovers:

Plus, the tracking tools don't know what to make of this outage and broken Google. Some charts are literally on fire and breaking through the X axis:

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So Google is a bit of a mess right now but I believe it is being worked on.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.

Update at 9:20 am ET: I am hearing some reports that some of the issues are returning back to normal. Keep in mind, that this can take a lot of time, even if you see that things are normal again, the next person might still see some pretty bad results. But this will resolve itself and I do hope those injured have a speed recovery.

Update at 2 pm ET: Hearing reports now that things are mostly back to normal.

Update the next day: It seems everything is back to normal for most of us...

Also the fire was likely unrelated to the outage according to Cnet.

 

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