On 14, December 2020 evening, almost all Google services including YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, Google Play Store, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, Google Groups, Google Hangouts, Google Keep, and Google Tasks became unavailable for users worldwide. Google instantly acknowledged this outage and then some of these services are back online now.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Google services including YouTube and Gmail were unavailable for about an hour globally.
• Google confirmed the outage and stated all their services got affected.
• Gmail and YouTube started working back but Google still hasn’t confirmed that services have been restored.

Google services stopped working on Monday evening, which impacted thousands of its users. Major services that were disrupted include Gmail, Google Search, YouTube, and Drive. The most recent outage seems to be more intensive than the previous which started around 5 pm IST today. 

Downdetector, (the website which tracks web outages) reports that 40,000 outage cases within 10 minutes of its outage around the world. YouTube and Gmail are most affected among all this, which became the trending hashtags on Twitter as people seem to have the worst hit on the first day of the week globally.

Update

Now, again users are reporting in the excitement that Gmail is working perfectly again and they could log into it as usual. They report that they also receive emails and some tell that they received a warning while logging in. However, Gmail says,

• “Gmail is temporarily unable to access your Contacts. You may experience issues while this persists.

YouTube, which is another service that got affected by this outage, and it’s back now. Users say that they could use YouTube on both mobile and Wi-Fi without any issues.

• “Gmail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change,” says Google on its Gmail status page.

Downdetector also shared over 50,000 outages, showing 900 flags for this outage at 6:19 PM, that Google services suffered today.

The story reports: Google services have faced outages earlier

Google confirms on its service status page that all their services are affected by this outage.

• Gmail says: “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by 12/14/20, 5:42 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”

The same message was repeated in all their services, with a red dot. Before this, Google’s status page had a green dot for all services, which continued to show up after 15 minutes since the outage began.

For a few users, Google Search was working perfectly while other users are facing problems even though Searches is not working for those users.

Google, updated its status page for Google services stating that all their services got impacted by this outage. YouTube also got impacted by the same issues.

• On Twitter, YouTube said: “We are aware that many of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now our team is aware and looking into it. We’ll update you here as soon as we have more news.”

This sudden outage prevailing in Google services affected many users to search for solutions, people switched to various other browsers for checking the problems they are facing. Some users report that they tried to log in to YouTube and Gmail on Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Safari browsers to check for solutions.

However, Google Search is working fine now in all browsers. This outage also affected mobile devices and websites that made apps temporarily unavailable for its users. Users also report that smart Nest speakers have stopped working with Google servers.

This indicates that Gmail, YouTube, and Drive apps on Android smartphone, tablet, iPhone, iPad, and Nest speakers will no longer be available until this outage prevails. Few users reported that some games including Pokemon Go also stopped working.

Thanks for reading!