New Delhi: Google Search appeared to suffer a widespread outage on Wednesday, with thousands of users across the world reporting that queries were failing to load or results were not displaying.

According to outage tracking platform Downdetector, nearly 7,000 users flagged issues at the peak of the disruption. Around 45 per cent of complaints were linked directly to Search, while 38 per cent of users reported that content was not loading. Another 12 per cent said they were unable to access the website altogether.

Users took to social media to report blank result pages, error messages and unusually long loading times after entering search queries. The spike in complaints suggested the disruption was not limited to a single geography.

Downdetector’s live outage map indicated that major US cities, including San Francisco, New York, Washington, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Chicago, were among the worst affected. However, scattered reports also emerged from other parts of the world, pointing to a broader service disruption.