Google Calendar came back online after being down for several hours Tuesday morning, leaving millions of users without their daily agenda. Instead of a day packed with back-to-back meetings and timely reminders, users were instead “treated” to an error message when they checked their schedule.
Users began to complain about the outage just after 7 a.m. PT, according to Down Detector. Google tweeted that Google Calendar was experiencing a “service disruption” about 40 minutes later. By 10:30 a.m. PT, Calendar service was restored to most users, according to Google’s status page. Catchpoint, an analytics firm which measures the speed and reliability of websites and apps, said the entire outage lasted two hours and 38 minutes.
“We’re all clear folks!,” Google’s G Suite Twitter account wrote. “Thanks for staying with us.”
We’re all clear folks! Thanks for staying with us.
— Google Workspace (@GoogleWorkspace) June 18, 2019
“The problem with Google Calendar and Hangouts Meet should be resolved,” said the Google Press Team in a statement shared with Digital Trends. “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”
As per the Google page on Down Detector, the issue affected users all over the globe. While undeniably annoying for anyone who relies on Google’s cloud-based calendar service, it only affected Google Calendar and not any of Google’s other services. That means that Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps and the rest were in working order.
A Mashable report said that the Google Calendar mobile app and third-party mobile apps that use Google Calendar data seemed to be working.
This isn’t the first time there’s been a problem with Google as of late. Early this month, a significant Google Cloud outage caused a number of different services to go down, which relied on the search giant. These included the Google-run Gmail and YouTube, along with Snapchat and ecommerce and point-of-sale platform Shopify.
The outage came after both Instagram and the PlayStation Network suffered major outages last week.
Given how many people rely on Calendar on a daily basis, we’re guessing this is top priority in Mountain View, California, right now. Calendar is an essential part of many users’ lives, reminding them of everything from meetings at works to birthdays and doctor appointments.
As per usual during a major outage, Google Calendar users took to Twitter to joke (and post GIFs) about their agenda confusion while what many consider an essential service was down. Without Google Calendar, how do you even know what day it is?
When google calendar crashes at the office pic.twitter.com/lhhlUCu8Fr
— Jace Goodwin (@thejacegoodwin) June 18, 2019
Google Calendar is down
People right now pic.twitter.com/LioNBin5em
— Shan (@shanuddin889) June 18, 2019
We’ll be monitoring the outage and will update this post with the latest developments.
