Google down! Gmail, YouTube and other services suffer massive global outage
Google users around the world struggled to connect to many of the company's services as a huge outage struck the search giant.
Problems started in the early hours of the morning in the US, and around lunchtime in Europe, with thousands of users experiencing error messages when attempting to use the likes of Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and Google Maps. The company issued a series of statements saying it was aware of problems "affecting a majority of users".
See also:
- Make your own emoji with Google's Emoji Kitchen
- Project Latte could see Android app support coming to Windows 10
- Google adds new privacy setting to Gmail for anyone happy to skip 'smart' features
Gmail inboxes failed to retrieve messages for quite some time, and attempts to access YouTube were met with an error message. Outage monitoring service Down Detector shows a massive spike in the number of reports from around the world from people experiencing problems using numerous Google services.
Although it took Google quite some time to say anything about what was going on, the company eventually released a statement saying:
We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail.
Similar statements were issued for other affected services, but Google gave no indication of what had caused the problems.
At the time of writing, services seem to be reinstated in many cases, but there are still reports of issues in various countries. If you are experiencing problems, you can try connecting to Google services using your browser's incognito or private browsing mode, as this seems to be helping in some instances.
Image credit: Anjo ten Kate / Shutterstock