September 20, 2024

Gmail, YouTube down: Google services suffering widespread outage

Google #Google

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Google services are down around the world.

DownDetector/Screenshot

Google services suffered a widespread outage that lasted over an hour on Monday, sparking complaints from users around the world that they couldn’t access their email. The problem appears to have affected Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Hangouts and Google Meet. 

According to DownDetector, the outage began at around 6:25 a.m. ET (3:25 a.m. PT) and continued for over an hour. Google’s own Workspace Status Dashboard showed all its services to be suffering outages without exception. But Google Search appeared to still be working, as did Chrome. At around 7:40 a.m. ET (4:40 a.m. PT) services started coming back online.

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Google’s own statement shows the timings to be different, however. According to a statement from a Google spokesperson the outage began at 3:47 a.m. PT and lasted for around 45 minutes. The outage was not caused by a cyberattack, but by “an internal storage quota issue.” 

“Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period,” said the spokesperson in a statement. “All services are now restored. We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

The outage was a rough start to the week not just for Google, but for all the workers, students and businesses around the world that rely on Google Services.

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Google’s Dashboard was a sorry sight.

Google/Screenshot

The hashtag #GoogleDown was trending on Twitter, with people complaining of being unable to do their jobs, complete assignments or meet important deadlines. Other users mused over our collective dependency on Google, wondering if it was perhaps, in fact, bad.

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