GOOGLE SUFFERED a major outage on Friday, leaving its internet search engine out of action for many users.
Google has yet to acknowledge the downtime that began at around 10.30am on Friday, but users have taken to Twitter to mock the outage.
One user said, "Google is down. THIS IS BING'S TIME TO SHINE," while another added, "To all those affected by #google crisis, you'll be happy to knowaltavista.com is still functioning brilliantly."
The outage has seen Google's search engine throwing up a 500 error message, which suggests that the firm has been suffering from an intermittent server error.
This message reads, "500. That's an error. The server encountered an error and could not complete your request. If the problem persists, please report your problem and mention this error message and the query that caused it. That's all we know."
It's unclear what was causing the error, nor is it known to what extent the outage reached. Here at The INQUIRER, we have been able to access the Google search engine without interruption, and it appears the service is now back up and running for most.
Google's search outage comes just a day after some users were left unable to access Gmail, with the webmail service instead showing a 502 error page which said, "The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds."
Google has yet to comment on the outage, but we have contacted it for comment.
