Google Services Including Gmail, YouTube Suffer Major Outage
Google products were failing to load for users in New York, the U.K. and in India.
(Bloomberg) -- Services from Alphabet Inc.’s Google experienced widespread outages around the world Monday, temporarily preventing people from accessing Gmail, YouTube and other products from the internet giant.
Errors ranged from a notice that “something went wrong” on YouTube, to “there was an error. Please try again later,” when attempting to log into the company’s mail product from about 6:30 a.m. in New York. Google tools were failing to load for users in the U.S., the U.K. and across Europe, but began functioning again for many people after about an hour.
Google confirmed there was an outage for the majority of its services on a Workspace Status Dashboard, which monitors the health of its products, but just before 8:00 a.m. it said functionality was restored to the “vast majority” of users.
The service disruption came from a technical flaw in services that require users to log in to online accounts. The company said it was not caused by a cyber-attack.
“Today, at 3:47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue,” a spokeswoman wrote in an email. “All services are now restored. We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”
Outages are not uncommon for any website or provider, with companies including Google as well as Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others routinely experiencing them due to temporary server disruptions often caused by human error. But Monday’s outage is notable for its pervasiveness across the Alphabet portfolio.
The company’s search product was functioning correctly, and third-party ads -- Google’s main revenue driver -- remained visible in results, suggesting advertising was unaffected.
The website DownDetector, which collates user-reported errors on websites, mobile networks and other platforms, was showing tens of thousands of complaints by 7:00 a.m. in New York, extending to Google’s office tools such as Drive and Meet, Google Maps, and Google’s smart home products such as Nest.
The popular mobile game Pokemon Go was also impacted, reports on DownDetector implied, most likely caused by Google accounts being necessary to log into the game.
In November, Amazon’s cloud-computing division suffered an outage that affected the ability of customers to use roughly two dozen services, hitting streaming hardware maker Roku, software seller Adobe and digital photo service Flickr.
The Google errors on Monday had an additional ramification for consumers who use its Home service to control smart devices, such as house lights -- numerous users complained on Twitter that they’d been plunged into darkness.
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