Google's search engine experienced a rare outage impacting systems around the world.

Users across the US, UK, Australia, Singapore and elsewhere reported the issue lasting for around 10 minutes, from 9:12pm EDT.

“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,” Google said in a statement.

“We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online.”

Outages to Google services happen occasionally, but its search engine is usually its most resilient product, staying online even during widespread Google Cloud issues.

The outage occurred a few hours before three electricians were rushed to hospital after an explosion at a Google data center in Iowa. It is not known if the two incidents are related.