Gmail, YouTube, and other Google services hit by massive outage

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Vijaya Laxmi Tripura

The latest outage, which seemed to be more intensive than the last one, apparently started during the second half of the day in Bangladesh. Since a major proportion of the economic activities greatly depend on Google, it was a great shock for each of them seeing their most essential service is down. While, those millions of YouTube users in Bangladesh as well as the owners of channels on it were terrified thinking if their favorite video sharing site was gone forever.

Downdetector, the website that tracks web outages, reported over 40,000 outage cases from around the world nearly 10 minutes after the outage began. YouTube and Gmail were the worst-hit globally, causing an uproar on Twitter.

Some users reported later in the day that Gmail was working again and they were able to log into it. However, Gmail was also showing a warning when users are logging back in. It says. “Gmail is temporarily unable to access your Contacts. You may experience issues while this persists.” YouTube, which was another service to have been affected by the outage, was back.

“Gmail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change,” says Google on its Gmail status page.

Reports quickly mounted on Twitter after users couldn’t access Google’s basic services, causing the hashtag “#YouTubeDOWN” to trend. At its peak, the status page for Google’s services was a sea of red, to indicate they were all suffering an outage. All services are now green indicating that they’re fully operational.

The world’s dependence on Google services led to a truly staggering number of reports on DownDetector, with the number of reported YouTube problems peaking at over 100,000. Some users found YouTube was still functional if they visited it in an incognito browser without signing in. Google Workspace apps like Docs and Meet were also down.

Users also reported that smart home gadgets integrated with Google Assistant were experiencing issues. We verified that a Nest Hub smart display was unable to control a connected smart heater, for example.

Third-party apps and services that rely on Google’s back end services, like Pokémon Go, were also hit by problems.

However, despite the outage affecting numerous Google services, its core search product continued to function, and third-party ads were still showing in results.

The outage was worldwide. We verified that services experienced issues in the US, UK, Netherlands, and Japan, and DownDetector’s outage reports spanned the globe.

Google has confirmed on its service status page that all its services suffered an outage. About Gmail, for example, it says: “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail.”

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