YouTube, Gmail and Other Google Services Down Prompts Flood of Jokes, Memes

Google and its services, such as YouTube and Gmail, all crashed on Monday morning and the internet couldn’t handle it, flooding Twitter with memes and jokes.

The widespread outage, which has since stopped, saw not just Gmail and YouTube that went down but other Google services such as Home, Cloud, Calendar, and the Google Play Store. The problem with Google seemed to occur early on Monday morning, mostly affecting the east coast of the U.S. and Europe.

In the immediate aftermath, Google users reacted to the multi-service crash by posting memes and jokes to Twitter.

One Twitter user said: “When you Google ‘why Google is not working,'” and added the smart guy meme.

Twitter user Aman reflected upon how this year is going and decided that Google crashing is a fairly apt end and said: “In the final episode of 2020, Google presenting you a week full of #googledown.”

Twitter user @jo_bazz shared a screenshot from a BBC news article that ironically said: “Google has been contacted for comment, but one spokesperson said they were unable to access their email.”

Another Twitter user joked, “This is what I feel without Google and YouTube,” with an image of cavemen trying to light a fire.

Others joked about what they had managed to achieve in the time that Gmail was down, like Imogen West-Knights who said: “emails are back! amazing though, in the last twenty minutes I cleaned my room, finished a book, filed two pieces, learnt to play guitar, mastered Spanish, humbly accepted an honorary doctorate and gave birth to beautiful twins.”

Alex Moshakis noted how the crash felt like an emergency and said: “google’s down so everyone’s congregating on Twitter, like a big old digital fire drill”

Twitter users also joked about how maybe now other search engines and email servers have a chance while Google’s down, while others bragged about not being affected by the crash.

Comedian Nish Kumar said: “finally it’s bing’s time to shine,” while Danny Sweeney said: “Every single Hotmail user on my timeline today be like” and attached an image of Homer Simpson wearing a crown and jewels.

Vedang on Twitter said: “Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, DuckDuckGo right now,” and attached the Me and The Boys meme.

Finally, The Great British Baking Show star Michael Chakraverty shared a video of Olivia Colman behind-the-scenes of The Crown giving a middle finger to the camera and said: “me, with my hotmail account, to all of you, without.”

A smartphone displaying Google apps like Chrome and Google Maps is seen in Hong Kong, on July 31, 2018. Multiple Google services like Gmail and YouTube were temporarily down on Monday morning. S3Studio/Getty