Google search attempts were met with error messages on Monday evening,

Sending the internet into a collective state of panic during the brief outage.

While it was not clear whether the issue was universal or only affected a subset of users,

Social media was flooded with reports of people being redirected to a "500" internal server error after attempting to search on Google beginning at around 9:20 p.m. EST.

The issue appeared to have been resolved for many by around 10 p.m., although sporadic outage reports continued.

Over 40,000 people reported Google outages to tracking website Downdetector.com on Monday.

Most users reported having difficulties with the search function, although issues with other services including Google Maps and the Google-owned YouTube were also reported.

Outage reports on Twitter were sometimes delivered with a sense of panic or disbelief that the massively popular search engine was not usable.