The largest search engine in the world suffered an intermittent outage Friday morning, which made users unable to conduct searches or access services via the main Google website. At 10.30am on Friday morning, Google went offline with a “500” error, affecting desktop browsers.

In the meantime, mobile version of the search engine accessed via mobiles and tablets was unaffected. Google mobile search apps and Google Now didn’t suffer outage either, nor did Google’s other services, like Gmail and Google Calendar. People couldn’t learn much from the explanation that an error message carried: “500. That’s an error. The server encountered an error and could not complete your request”. Too sad, but what to do, asked ordinary users trying to google another pirate movie. The service always has the same answer to any question silently asked by its users: “If the problem persists, please report your problem and mention this error message and the query that caused it. That’s all we know”. Not too much help either.

The error message 500 meant that the website encountered an internal server error. Both the US and UK versions of the search engine were suffering intermittent outages Friday morning, while the company wasn’t quick to be contacted for comment. Apparently, everyone out there was busy solving the problem. As usual, Internet users were quick to discuss the issue on Twitter.

The company is headquartered in California, where the outages began at 2am local time on the first day of the Independence Day holiday. Industry experts recall that the search engine was last seriously affected a decade ago, when a variant of the MyDoom virus was used to contact its servers repeatedly. At the time, Google users in Europe received a “server error” message as well.