Late Thursday May 23, 2019, Google’s Webmasters Twitter account tweeted that Google is suffering a new indexing problem that is completely separate from the previous day’s indexing issue.
Here is the text of the tweet:
We’re looking into a new indexing issue that started escalating 6 hours ago. The issue is unrelated to yesterday’s outage and we’re working hard to resolve it. We’ll update this thread when we can provide more information.
Google then tweeted on Sunday May 26th that it was resolved:
Google tweeted the following on Sunday May 26, 2019: “This issue has been resolved — thanks for your patience!Wishing you all a great week.”
Are Outages Due to Human Error?
Google again did not provide details of what is going on. I have previously speculated that these outages have been due to an infrastructure update that wasn’t rolling out well. My regard for Google’s sophistication precluded the consideration that their internal processes were vulnerable to simple human errors, like uploading a bad file or deleting a staged version of the index.
But according to credible rumors (not directly from Google), the outages are not due to an infrastructure update. What I was told was that the first series of outages in April were due to human error. (READ: April 2019 Google Outages Due to Human Error)
What I was told seems to align with what Barry at Search Engine Roundtable reported that he was told that the indexing issues were unrelated to algorithmic or infrastructure updates.
The level of outages at Google is 100% without precedent. Google is promising more information. It will be interesting to hear what is really going on directly from Google.
Some publishers responded with humor:
If what I have heard (not directly from Google) is correct, that tweet might not be too far from the truth. Monitor the official Google updates on Twitter here.
