Google services Maps, YouTube and others went down for thousands of users: Here’s what happened

Alphabet Inc’s Google was down for thousands of users on Monday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. There were more than 40,000 incidents of people reporting issues with the world’s largest search engine, according to Downdetector. The website tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.
What did the error message say
Users encountered the following message: “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.” The ‘Error 500’ usually indicates an issue with the server. Most users reported problems while using Google search, some small number using other services.

Google services affected by the outage
According to multiple users on Twitter, the outage affected Google search, Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Drive, Google Duo, GMail and YouTube. As mentioned above, 80% of users reported issues with search.
How long the Google outage last
The outage lasted for almost an hour. The issues began at around 6:37am IST when reports of problems began to rise above the baseline and peaked around 7:07am. The affected services started returning to normal by 7:22am.
Was the outage global, did it affect India
No, the outage was widespread but not entirely global. There were no reports of outage from users in India. At the peak of the outage, more than 30,000 users reportedly indicated issues with Google in the United States. Some 5,900 users reported problems in Japan, as per the tracking website. According to Network intelligence company ThousandEyes, some 1,338 servers globally across more than 40 countries including the United States, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Israel, parts of South America, Europe and Asia including China and Japan experienced outages.
What did Google say
Google confirmed the outage. In a statement, Google spokesperson said, “We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google search and Maps.” “We apologise for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online,” the statement added.