Last night, Google had a significant outage that is continuing today. It appeared to be more than a power outage, as numerous complaints about indexing problems, pages dropping out of the index, and super poor quality and outdated search results were presented in Google this morning.

A Google data center fire 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.”

News Article 1, News Article 2, News Article 3, and more news articles.

Many searchers saw this as they tried to access the internet:

Google Outage Updates

• Update 8/9/22 9:00 AM CST; we are hearing reports that some issues are returning to normal. Please note we expect this to take some time until Google services are to what we'd consider “back to normal.”  Services will be resolved, and we expect to see minimal organic traffic impact. 
• Update 8/9/22  2:00 PM CST; we are hearing reports that most Google services are back up and online. As we mentioned earlier, we expect to see minimal organic traffic impact to all of our customer's websites. 

We'll keep you updated as we learn more about this and how it might impact search traffic. 

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us.