If you’ve been experiencing issues trying to access Google or YouTube, you’re not alone. Around 9 p.m. ET on Thursday evening, tons of users worldwide reported problems with Google and the many services under the tech giant’s umbrella, including Google Drive, Gmail, Stadia, the Play Store, and even Nest.
Some, such as Gmail, were taking significantly more time to load while other services like Google’s Play Store and Calendar seemed to be on an endless boot-up loop and wouldn’t load at all. DownDetector currently shows outages for just about all of Google’s services in areas all over the world. According to the site, the bulk of reports are coming from Australia, the U.S., and east Asia, with users primarily having issues logging in.
We’ve reached out to Google for more info. Honestly, a worldwide Google outage is absolutely on-brand for the year we’re having so far, so I’m hardly surprised.
Update: 9/24/2020; 11:17 p.m. ET: Luckily, the problem appears to have been short-lived. An update from Google’s Cloud status dashboard showed that the issue across had been resolved “for most traffic” across Google’s services shortly after 10:30 p.m. ET.
When asked about the cause of the outage, a Google Cloud spokesperson provided the following non-answer: “We experienced a short service disruption affecting several products including G Suite, and are now recovering.”
G/O Media may get a commission
Google’s senior VP of technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, shared a bit more info on Twitter. Apparently, the whole thing was one hell of a server crash.
“A pool of servers that route traffic to application backends crashed, and users on that particular pool experienced the outage,” he wrote, adding that while a few minor application programming interfaces affected by the incident, there was “no major impact” on Google Cloud Platform.
The company’s currently working on a postmortem to avoid this kind of widespread outage from happening again, according to Hölzle.
