Google users around the world were unable to access the search engine on Tuesday as a spate of server outages plagued the company.

Reports surfaced on Tuesday morning (AEST) that Google.com was inaccessible for many users, with internet outage company ThousandEyes tracking more than a thousand Google server outages worldwide.

The cause of the issue wasn’t immediately clear, but Australians took to  social media with reports the world’s biggest search engine was down.

“Looks like Google in Australia is busted,” one internet user tweeted.

Several hours after the outages were reported a Google spokesperson apologised for the issues, blaming an internal software update.

“We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google search and Maps,” they said.

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

Tweet from @iamnottomgreen

Outage firm Down Detector said the issues began at 11.12AM (AEST).

Down Detector also reported issues accessing Google Maps, beginning from about 11.36AM (AEST).

Google users on social media were met with error pages stating, “the server encountered an error and could not complete your request”.

Another common error message said: “We’re sorry but it appears there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue”.

However the outages were not universal, with some users able to access the search engine and related apps such as Maps without issue.

Google was trending worldwide on Twitter as reports of the outages spread around the world on Monday afternoon.

Users in Japan, Ireland, the United States, England, Kenya, Israel and New Zealand all reported experiencing issues with Google services.

Google.com is the world’s most visited website, with an estimated 89 billion visits from around the world every year, according to Statista.