Google down – many services, including Gmail, unreachable

Services from Google were experiencing widespread outages around the world on Monday, preventing people from accessing Gmail, YouTube and other products.

Errors ranged from “something went wrong” on YouTube, to “there was an error. Please Try again later. That’s all we know,” when attempting to login to the company’s mail product. Google products were failing to load for users in New York, the UK, Europe and South Africa.

Google confirmed there was a service outage for the majority of its services according to a Workspace Status Dashboard, which monitors the health of its products.

Outages are not uncommon for any website or provider, with companies including Google as well as Apple, Amazon.com, Microsoft and others routinely experiencing them due to temporary server errors often caused by human error. But Monday’s outage is notable for its pervasiveness across Google’s portfolio.

The company’s search product was functioning correctly, and third-party ads — Google’s main revenue driver — remained visible in results, suggesting advertising was unaffected.

Widespread

The website Downdetector, which collates user-reported errors on websites, mobile networks and other platforms, was showing tens of thousands of complaints, extending to Google’s office tools such as Drive and Meet, Google Maps, and Google’s smart home products such as Nest.

The popular mobile game Pokemon Go was also impacted, reports on Downdetector implied, most likely caused by Google accounts being necessary to login to the game.

In November, Amazon.com’s cloud computing division suffered an outage that affected the ability of customers to use roughly two dozen services, hitting streaming hardware maker Roku, software seller Adobe and digital photo service Flickr.  — Reported by Nate Lanxon, (c) 2020 Bloomberg LP