Is Google down? Outage hits thousands of users across the globe

Google went down for thousands of users worldwide this afternoon, leaving them unable to use the popular search engine.

Gmail, Google News and Discover were also affected.

Users in the UK were hit by the outage around 1pm, with problems also reported across the US and Australia, according to the website Down Detector.

Millions of Google searches are made every minute, while the company’s email service Gmail is thought to have more than 1.8 billion users.

Google Chrome, the company’s internet browser, is also used by around two thirds of all people on the internet, but did not appear to be affected.

Users took to social media to share their experiences and see if others had the same.

On X, Simone Hanna wrote: ‘Never thought I’d say this but is GOOGLE down for anyone else? It’s making it impossible or for me to search news.’

Independent game developer Ajesh Nair speculated the servers may be at fault.

‘Google News not working!’!!’ he said. ‘Google News server down I guess!’

However, by mid-afternoon the services all appeared back online.

A Google spokesperson said: ‘There was an issue that was briefly affecting some results on Google News, Discover and other products. We’ve fixed the issue and things should be working normally now.

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