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:
It's not just you, Google Search is having issues - 9to5Google https://t.co/lw7XOpqgQn
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) August 9, 2022
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:
— cuong vt hcm (@thienhung_dlu) August 9, 2022
Google is broken. pic.twitter.com/4p1OIs1bBU
— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) August 9, 2022
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:
Many URLs across various sites are deindexed for intended KWs OR the domains are ranking lower for other pages that reference the target query (e.g. category pages). Also, GSC is producing errors when requesting indexation. Seems widespread. cc:@rustybrick @dannysullivan @JohnMu
— Vlad Rappoport 🇺🇦 (@vladrpt) August 9, 2022
Is an indexing issue going on at the moment?
— Christian Radny (@ChrisRadny) August 9, 2022
SERPS dramatically changed. I am missing many pages which I saw yesterday.
site: shows ~ -40% pages for my sites.
My US Flag is gone. 😪 @JohnMu @SEO_Suedwest @googlesearchc @searchliaison @rustybrick @dannysullivan #SEO pic.twitter.com/LMxNmTBpN0
@rustybrick Hi Barry,
— nishant Gupta (@nishant76026848) August 9, 2022
Seems like the Google search algorithm is going on
Also, We are noticing some keywords are not showing on Google search as per their position and the same keyword data is showing in GSC.
we are also facing this issues
— Money Innovate (@MoneyInnovate) August 9, 2022
@googlesearchc is there an indexing issue today? A lot of people seem to complain that their sites have disappeared from results? @rustybrick maybe you know more?
— Bastiir (@BastiirMatt) August 9, 2022
Google is aware and John Mueller of Google thinks things will soon start to fix itself as Google recovers:
I'd keep an eye on it today, and please let me know if it doesn't look like the main URLs are settling down again. (We don't index everything, so I'd focus on the important URLs for things like this.)
— 🥔 johnmu of switzerland (personal) 🥔 (@JohnMu) August 9, 2022
Let me know if it doesn't settle down over the course of the day, happy to check with some folks here.
— 🥔 johnmu of switzerland (personal) 🥔 (@JohnMu) August 9, 2022
Yeah, Brodie.
— 🥔 johnmu of switzerland (personal) 🥔 (@JohnMu) August 9, 2022
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:
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.
