Is Google down? Widespread outages reported across APAC, search broken for many users

Google
Google Headquarters (Image credit: Future)

If you’re an APAC resident and you’ve found Google services intermittently glitchy all afternoon, it isn’t just you — thousands of users have flocked to outage-tracking sites like Downdetector and IsDown.app to report problems with the search giant, starting around 5:30am BST / 12:30am EDT / 2:30pm AEST on May 12.

Downdetector received as many as 6,625 reports from Australia, specifically relating to search, content not loading and the Google.com website. IsDown also received reports from India, the Philippines, New Zealand and Malaysia. There were also a handful of reports from the US and UK, though it’s unclear if this was due to the time difference (being after midnight in the US and and early morning in the UK) and the smaller number of online denizens that entails.

I’ve personally experienced the same issues all afternoon, alongside the rest of the TechRadar Australia team and other local colleagues, with searches on Google displaying an error message that reads:

Server Error We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue. Please try again later.

Google search error message

(Image credit: Future | Nico Arboleda)

Google has yet to confirm the outage in its Workspace Status Dashboard as of 8:00am BST / 3:00am EDT / 5:00pm AEST, which still says “No Incidents”. We’ve contacted Google Australia and New Zealand for comment, but had not yet received a response as of 5:45PM AEST.

This is a developing story.

Nico Arboleda
Staff Writer

Nico is an experienced writer and journalist, having previously written for business titles across Australia.  While mainly focusing on phones and finding deals and coupon codes at TechRadar Australia, he is also a keen cyclist and occasional hiker, so he also loves related tech like smartwatches and bike computers. Outside of tech, Nico is also a politics, basketball and movie obsessive.

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