Google is back online after users around the world reported a brief outage
Users in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Singapore and elsewhere reported issues with Google, which is owned by Alphabet.
The entrance to Google's U.K. offices in London.
Olly Curtis | Future Publishing | via Getty Images
Google was briefly down on Tuesday, with users in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Singapore and elsewhere reporting issues with the search engine, which is owned by Alphabet.
DownDetector.com confirmed that the website was "having problems."
At its peak in the U.S., more than 40,000 people reported that Google wasn't working. The figure quickly fell, and has stayed below 100 since around 2 a.m. ET.
"We're aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google Search and Maps, and we apologize for the inconvenience," Google said in a statement.
"We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online."
Google was trending on Twitter briefly, with many users using the hashtag #GoogleDown.
Some posted screenshots of error messages and others joked about trying to search on Google to check if the search engine was down.
— CNBC's Ryan Browne contributed to this report.