Google, YouTube Outages Whip Twitter Into Frenzy: ‘Is This a Global Emergency?’

Popular search engine sparked panic on social media when it crashed on Wednesday night

Google sparked panic on social media when it crashed on Wednesday around 9:20 p.m. PT.

Once people realized the outage had occurred, users of America’s most popular search engine quickly began complaining about the problems on websites that were still functioning, such as Twitter and Facebook.

“Dare I say Google is down. Is that a global emergency?” one distressed Twitter user wrote, while another asked: “Did Google die?”

The technical glitch, which also affected YouTube, came just hours after Google launched a new cell phone service called Project Fi, which offers the same basic functionality as traditional wireless carriers, such as voice, text and Internet access, at a lower price than many plans.

The service will cost $20 a month for talk and text with data charges on top of that.

There was no proof that the launch of Project Fi was connected to Wednesday’s outage, and not surprisingly, once the tech giant’s site was back up and running, information about the crash didn’t pop up on the search engine.

Read some of the distressed tweets below.

https://twitter.com/andylevy/status/591093521219719168

https://twitter.com/JasonHirschhorn/status/591096211077206016

https://twitter.com/itslawicki/status/591114090166128641

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