A software bug that disrupted Google for around eight hours Tuesday triggered talks of hacking.

The disruption involved several images of car crashes in Russia near a Russian "stop" sign appearing in some searches.

For example, if users were to search for "Emmys" in Google Images, the search engine would produce the image of the crashed car several times instead of photos related to the Emmys

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Despite the error, the Google dashboard that monitors interruptions to its services didn't cite any errors related to the car crash image.

Some saw the incident as a possible infiltration by hackers attempting to spread propaganda related to the turmoil in Ukraine between Ukraine and pro-Russian rebels.

"Everybody is confused about how this could happen on such a large scale. How does the largest search engine in the world roll out an update and not notice that 90% of image search results show a car crash in Russia?" said A.J. Ghergich, founder of Ghergich & Co., a search-engine marketing agency.

Ghergich doesn't believe the system was hacked because the search engine's queries are handled by data centers in various parts of the world.

After the software bug was fixed, Google apologized to its users.

Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder of search engine DuckDuckGo, speculated the issue might have resulted from an update to one of the search engine's algorithms that control query results.

He said test queries for algorithm updates may sometimes remain inside the software code when the update takes effect. Because of the changes made, queries can produce the same images or results several times.

Weiberg noted DuckDuckGo also updated its system once previously, resulting in errors. The system took a few hours to fix.