Posted on December 14, 2020 at 5:50 PM

Google Experiences Outages In Major Services

It’s not often you hear that Google is experiencing major outages. But from user experiences this morning, the tech giant has experienced an outage as major services including Google Maps, Google Suite, Gmail, and Youtube started experiencing issues at about 6:30 a.m. Eastern Time.

Later in the day, Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard confirmed that ball its products are experiencing technical issues after being hit by an outage. But despite the outage, Google’s search engine is still working properly.

The data from Downdetector suggests that all regions are affected by the outage, as reports came from Australia, the USA, Japan, India, Europe, and several other countries.

Outages reported by thousands of users

Thousands of users have already reported issues with their YouTube and Gmail accounts.

Over 19,000 users have reported that their accounts are inaccessible. The accounts cut across all Google products. Also, Google’s suite of products is currently showing error messages, unresponsive, or not loading.

Users who are not happy about the development have gone to Twitter to express their complaints and find out what is happening.

Another posted: “The day came. When you can’t even google what happened with Google. It’s still 2020,” a user posted on Twitter.

Another user wrote “When you Google why Google is not working #googledown”

Most of the #Googledown# tweets are coming from Europe even though the issue is a global one.

It’s not clear when the tech giant will resolve the issue and resume full service and no one knows why all the Google products are affected.

However, some reports are coming in indicating that Google Docs is beginning to respond and some emails are filtering through.

Google has not officially tweeted in response to the development. Also, Google’s service dashboard has not reported any issues with its services despite the widespread outage of almost all its products.

When the tech giant was contacted for information about the outage, a spokesperson said they have not been able to access their email a well.

Later at noon, Google issued a statement pointing out that most of its Gmail users are not able to access their mail and it’s aware of that

“We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users,” Google noted.

Users Still Experiencing Issues

Although Google says it’s trying to fix the issue, some users are still receiving 404 error messages at the time of writing.

The message reads “the server cannot process the request because it is malformed.

In other regions, the message reads “We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable,” with apologies rendered subsequently.

On Google Drive and YouTube, the error message says “Something went wrong” when the user tried to log into any of the platforms.

According to the Downdetector web tracker, the problem peaked at about 5 PM and it has affected users all over the world.

Other major Google products also down

Apart from the popular Google services, other Google services were also affected, including Google Cloud Search, Google Voice, Google Tasks, Google Keep, Google Vault, Currents, Google Meet, Google Chat, Google Hangouts, Google Groups, Google Sites, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, and Google Sheets.

The status page of Google’s services has acknowledged the incident and said it will provide an update about the time the issue will be resolved. Google also pointed out that the resolution time is not definite and may change.

The brief outage has impacted millions of Google product users, as a lot of them depend on Google services for basic work apps like emails. Google connected smart devices like Google Home was also affected. Some users even complained they are not able to switch off some lights in their homes.

Other app users such as gamers on Pokemon Go are also not left out, as they reported being unable to log into their accounts.

The outage across all Google products is a sharp reminder of how millions of users are relying on Google products and apps, especially services in the cloud.