Technology

Google Search faces outage, users report '500 Internal Server Error'

Published On Tue, 12 May 2026
Asian Horizan Network
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New Delhi, May 12 (AHN) US-based tech giant Alphabet Inc's Google Search experienced a global outage on Tuesday morning, with users in India, the US and several other regions reporting difficulties accessing the platform.
Many users attempting to use the search engine were shown a message saying, “We are 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.”
The disruption triggered a surge in user complaints across online outage-tracking platforms and social media, with hundreds of reports emerging from India alone within a short span of time.
Moreover, the issue was identified as a '500 Internal Server Error', which generally indicates a server-side problem rather than an issue with users’ devices or internet connections.
The error typically occurs when communication between a user’s browser and the company’s servers is interrupted due to technical problems in the backend infrastructure.
In addition, several users said they were unable to perform searches or access results intermittently during the outage period.
Earlier, several technology platforms, including AI services, also experienced outages.
In March, China’s popular AI chatbot DeepSeek suffered one of the biggest disruptions in its history, with the platform reportedly remaining offline for more than seven hours overnight.
Similarly, users of Instagram reported widespread issues during the same month, mainly related to inaccessible direct messages (DMs) and the disappearance of chat themes. Users also posted complaints on Instagram’s subreddit and other social media platforms about being unable to use the search feature or view contacts.
In February, YouTube also witnessed a global outage. The platform later confirmed that services had been restored, with TeamYouTube posting on X that the issue had been fixed across the platform.