Google services suffered widespread outages on Monday, December 14.
Thousands of users across the globe were unable to access many of the company’s services, including YouTube, Gmail, Docs, and dozens of the various services in Google suite products. More than 50,000 people have encountered issues such as not loading, unresponsive, or showing error messages.
The outage also affected Google-connected smart devices, such as its Home speakers, and had a knock-on effect on other apps which require users to log in with their Google details.
I’m sitting here in the dark in my toddler’s room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking… a lot right now.
— Joe Brown (@joemfbrown) December 14, 2020
Google’s search engine, however, remained unaffected by the issue.
The cause of the outage was unclear, but users were still able to access the websites’ landing pages in “incognito mode”, which does not store a log of the users’ browsing activity.
Despite the widespread outage, Google’s service dashboard initially showed no errors – before switching to red status across all services.
“We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail,” the statement said, with the word “Gmail” replaced by other services.
Almost an hour later, the Google crisis has been resolved. However, it was an unnerving reminder of just how dependent millions of people have become on services in the cloud.
We’re all clear folks! Thanks for staying with us.
— Google Workspace (@GoogleWorkspace) December 14, 2020
Such failures in Google’s systems are rare, though a problem with some servers caused difficulties for US users in June 2019.
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