Google services fell sharply on Monday night, affecting hundreds of users. Services that were discontinued at the time of writing include Gmail, Google Search, YouTube, and Drive, among others. The last outage, which appears to be more intense than the previous one, apparently started about 10-15 minutes ago. Downdetector, the website that tracks network outages, has reported more than 40,000 instances of outages around the world. YouTube and Gmail appear to have been hit the hardest globally, sparking an uproar on Twitter about how Google services have left them high and dry, especially on the first day of the week.
Meanwhile, Google’s own crawler for its online services does not appear to have been updated. Despite reports of outages on all Google consumer products such as Gmail and YouTube, the Google Services Status page at this time shows no outages for each service. It shows a green dot, which necessarily means that the services are up and running as expected. It may take Google servers some time to reflect the changes. For some people, Google Search seems to work fine, while some users report that even Search doesn’t work for them.
We are aware that many of you are having trouble accessing YouTube at the moment, our team knows and is looking into it. We will update it here as soon as we have more news.
– TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) December 14, 2020
Google has yet to publicly acknowledge anything, which implies that the company publishes a statement or tweet to show that this error was genuine and that the company is working to fix it as soon as possible. But the YouTube team, in the meantime, has addressed the problem. On Twitter YouTube said: “We are aware that many of you are having trouble accessing YouTube at the moment, our team is aware and is investigating it. We will update it here as soon as we have more news.
The sudden suspension of Google services made people rush to look for different solutions, including switching to different browsers to check if the situation eases a bit. Some users have said on Twitter that they tried to use YouTube and Gmail in Microsoft Edge, Firefox and Safari browsers to make these websites work, but to no avail. However, Google Search works fine in any browser.
The outage not only affected web services, but also caused smart devices and applications to become temporarily inaccessible. Users report that Nest smart speakers also don’t connect to Google’s servers. This would mean that the Gmail, YouTube, and Drive apps on your Android smartphone, tablet, iPhone, iPad, and Nest speakers won’t work for the duration of the outage.
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