SAN FRANCISCO (REUTERS, BLOOMBERG) - Alphabet Inc's Google was down for thousands of users on Monday (Aug 8), according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

There were more than 40,000 incidents of people reporting issues with the world's largest search engine, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.

User reports of issues with the service began inundating Downdetector from around 9pm New York time on Monday (9am Tuesday Singapore time).

Problems loading the Google website and performing searches were also observed in Taiwan and Japan, though the services appeared to be intermittently available.

Google's signature product is known for its ubiquity and reliability and service disruptions of this kind are rare.

The most common causes of such failures are back-end web infrastructure, such as those experienced by Fastly and Amazon Web Services last year.

The service appeared to be mostly restored at just before 10pm New York time.

Alphabet didn't immediately provide comment.