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Google services recovering after multiple hours of outages

Andrew Martonik
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Earlier today Google faced a catastrophic outage that disrupted all of its online services, from Gmail and Contacts to YouTube and Drive. Depending on a person’s location, Google services have been experiencing issues connecting, running, or performing properly. Some Google services return a “500” error page, while others load sporadically, and some load but then don’t function.

According to reports from Downdetector, which aggregates complaints about service problems from the public, the issues started cropping up around 6:45 a.m. ET this morning. As you’d expect, the largest number of reports are for Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive (Docs). We’re also seeing ongoing reports of users unable to sign in to Google services if they weren’t already signed in.

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Google’s App Status Dashboard, which lists the operating status of its various services, showed a complete “service outage” for every one of its services. Typically, the worst we’ll see on the App Status Dashboard is a “service disruption” on a single service, like Gmail, or two related services, like Gmail and Contacts — to see red lights across the board is incredible. The Google Cloud status dashboard shows fully operational service for its backend infrastructure.

Beyond superfluous things like whether I can check my personal email this morning, Google Classroom was also having issues. That’s in addition to Docs, Sheets, and Slides, which together could make today’s remote learning environment … well, dicey. Add in the fact that an increasing number of businesses are run on Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), and you have a recipe for a rough Monday.

Roughly three hours after issues first started manifesting, the Status Dashboard started to show fully operation service, with a lingering service disruption on Gmail in particular.

Unfortunately, if you’re still experiencing issues there isn’t anything you can do on your end. Some people are seeing fully restored service, but with data center diversification and ISP caching, depending on where you live it could take hours more for everything to get back to normal even if Google’s fixed the problems on its end.

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