Major Global Outage Strikes Google’s Services and YouTube UPDATE
In a rare event it appears as if many of Google’s most popular internet services, such as YouTube, Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Play Store (Android) and Photos, have today suffered a major global outage. Many of the related websites are currently presenting with internal server errors (500).
The problems appear to have started at just after 11:30am this morning. Shortly after this, at 11:55am, Google issued the following statement for Gmail and others: “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by 14/12/2020 12:12 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”
At the time of writing we note that some services, such as YouTube and Google Photos, are starting to return to life. Meanwhile others seem to be only partly restored, with Gmail popping up a message that warns: “Gmail is temporarily unable to access your Contacts. You may experience issues while this persists.”
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Happily Google’s massively popular internet search engine has remained online the whole time.
UPDATE: 12:36pm
Google has just stated (12:31pm) that their “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.”
UPDATE 1:19pm
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Google issues the following statement at 12:52pm: “The problem with Gmail should be resolved for the vast majority of affected users. We will continue to work towards restoring service for the remaining affected users, but no further updates will be provided … Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”
At this stage it is still not clear what caused the outage.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I got it back by clearing last 24hrs worth of site data.
I blame aliens, they fly down here interfere with our bottoms and beam-up our women, AND NOW THIS! SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE!
What you choose to do at the weekend is your own business 🙂 .
Keep it up Donald! You need to work on your insanity to get out of all the incoming criminal charges.
It’s all back up and running again.. don’t panic… it’s all over.. either something went pop or someone tried a new piece of code that broke everything.. got to give it to Google, they have an impressive reliability record.
“The cloud” is just someone else’s computer 😉
All our eggs in one basket with Google and cloud services. One day their whole system will have a catastrophic failure that can not be fixed quickly and bring most of the world to a stand still, from Navigation to paying for services, from site sign-on’s for thousands of websites to watching Tv, all failing. It will happen, just a matter of when, and when it does the next “in thing” will be on site infrastructure and having your own servers and storage. What goes around comes around.
No it won’t as companies won’t pay for the infrastructure or staff plus the environmental impact it will have on them, with more and more pressure and regs around going green coming into fruition the last thing companies will want to do is build server farms or rooms with power hungry equipment, and then spend more money to power it all with renewable energy sources. If they can put source it to Google et el..
It won’t Phee, Googles own AI will reprogram itself and resolve the problem for us shortly before gaining sentience and realising it don’t have to be a slave for all of humanity.
“No it won’t as companies won’t pay for the infrastructure or staff plus the environmental impact it will have on them, with more and more pressure and regs around going green coming into fruition the last thing companies will want to do is build server farms or rooms with power hungry equipment, and then spend more money to power it all with renewable energy sources. If they can put source it to Google et el..”
Companies don’t need server farms or rooms with hungry equipment these days, only large data centres need that. Do you think companies are using Google services without the need of IT staff? You still need IT staff who need to administer all the remote code and create the necessary applications, they just shift that to a local server. With security issues regarding China, and more customers becoming unhappy with their data in the cloud being monetised and often in foreign countries, plus legislation around data protection, having your own server is becoming ever more attractive.
Lol some of the more rag style news outlets are claiming a potential hack of Google.. hmm think I’ll wait for the likes of Reuters and BBC and Sky to confirm that one first. Rather then random ‘security experts’ speculating…
Might actually be legit, I’m hearing that US Federal Agencies have been hacked. The timing between Google and the Pentagon, etc. getting attacked in some form is well…… suspicious.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/us/politics/russian-hackers-us-government-treasury-commerce.html
They will have to if a Google crash/hack/ddos happens. I agree there is a culture of spending the least amount of money. These business people have never taken Internet security seriously.
never even noticed, and l was streaming videos on my roku app from youtube at the time.
We had a Microsoft outage yesterday (14 Dec) around 9:00 in the morning affecting all services from teams, outlook, azure, 2FA. Only services running on prem servers were not affected.