For many South Africans and users around the world, searching for something, and looking up information on Google is almost second nature. However on Wednesday night Google services including search, Maps, YouTube, and Gmail were not accessible.
According to Downdetector.co.za, the problems were first reported at 19:21 and persisted until as late as 11pm. Other African countries were hit by the outage, namely Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria.
Google services seldom suffer outages, and when they do, they are restored in fairly a quick time. We have listed some alternatives in the event that you need to desperately search for information during a Google outage.
Bing
Bing is probably one of the most popular alternative search engines and boasts impressive features as well as user experience.
SwissCows
A lesser-known but still a good option is SwissCows. It is a zero-tracking private search engine based in Switzerland. SwissCows is hosted on secure Swiss infrastructure.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo does not collect or store any of your personal information and can be your go-to if you want to keep browsing habits and personal data private.