Google down for thousands of users: Downdetector

Alphabet Inc's Google-- and a number of its services-- were down for thousands of users on Monday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

There were more than 40,000 people worldwide reporting issues with the world's largest search engine, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

"User reports indicate Google Maps is having problems since 9.36pm local time," Downdetector tweeted.

According to the website, after around two hours, reports of the outage began tapering, but a small number of users continued to report trouble accessing Google's cloud and calendar functions.

"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," a Google spokesperson said.

• Google fires software engineer who claimed its AI chatbot is sentient