TLTP
CALIFORNIA
Google users across the globe faced disruption to services on Monday with Gmail, Google Drive and YouTube apparently down in dozens of countries.
Users received error messages with the outage quickly trending on social media accounts from locations across the globe. All of the services are run by Google’s parent company Alphabet.
Errors range from “something went wrong” on YouTube, to “there was an error. Please Try again later. That’s all we know,” when attempting to login to the company’s mail product. Google products were failing to load for users in New York, the UK and across Europe.
Internet monitoring tool downdetector.com showed most complaints were from users in Europe, followed by the US eastern seaboard, Japan, eastern Asia and Russia.
Other services that were down included Google Classroom – which has been widely used since the start of the coronavirus outbreak – Google Play and Google Hangouts.
Outages are not uncommon for major websites or internet providers and often not due to hacking or any other form of attack.
Companies including Google as well as Apple, Amazon.com, Microsoft, and others routinely experience them due to temporary server errors often caused by human error.
But Monday’s outage is notable for its pervasiveness across the Alphabet portfolio.
Despite that, Google’s main search – used by billions every day – appeared to be functioning correctly, and third-party ads – the main source of income for the tech giant – remained visible in various results.
Downdetector.com noted that about 260,000 users reported problems with accessing YouTube in 20 minutes from when services dropped out at about 11:48am GMT. About 86,000 users reported Gmail issues, while 122,000 reported problems accessing Google.com.
