#Images of Winston Churchill temporarily vanished from Google search results

Images of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill temporarily vanished from Google over the weekend after the World War II leader’s statue in London was defaced, according to a report.

Searches for “British prime minister” and “World War 2 general” on Saturday brought up pictures of other notable figures, including Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, but not Churchill, the BBC reported on Monday.

Churchill’s image reappeared on the website later Sunday, according to the report.

Google blamed missing images of Churchill on a technical issue.

“A bug in our systems prevented a new representative image from updating. As a result, Churchill’s entry lacked an image from late April until this weekend, when the issue was brought to our attention & resolved soon after,” a message from Google SearchLiaison said on Twitter.

Google went on to explain that it received feedback in April that an image of Churchill picked by the tech giant’s systems portrayed a younger man when pictures of the prime minister typically depicted him as older.

“Following our procedures, human reviewers processed the feedback, determined the image wasn’t most representative of Churchill & we blocked the unrepresentative image to allow the systems to automatically select a different one,” Google said, adding “this was not purposeful.”

The death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department on May 25 sparked protests around the US and the world amid calls for criminal justice reform.

Across the country, various statues of Columbus, Confederate soldiers, and others were toppled, as demands grew for US military installations named after Confederate generals be renamed.

The movement spread across the ocean where activists called for the removal of statues depicting figures linked to Britain’s slave trade and colonialism.

Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square had “racist” painted on its base.