MUMBAI: Multiple Google services including YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Hangouts, Google Assistant were down for more than an hour on Monday evening after suffering a major outage in India and several parts of the world.
Google acknowledged the outage across its products on the company's status page at 5.25 pm, saying that "it is aware of the problem affecting a majority of users".
We are aware that many of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now – our team is aware and looking into it. We'll update you here as soon as we have more news.
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) December 14, 2020
This was after several people took to Twitter to report the inability to access these services, while Downdetector, a website that provides an overview of outages across several Internet services, had indicated major spikes for several of Google services starting 5pm India standard time.
#googledown never thought this day would come pic.twitter.com/N4ZGXtFPhb
— Sreeraman Thiagarajan (@sreeraman) December 14, 2020
Nearly an hour later at 6.22pm, the tech giant said that it has resolved the problem "for the vast majority of affected users" and it will continue to "work towards restoring service for the remaining affected users".
So...@YouTube is down? pic.twitter.com/RHFbQ5O2R1
— Ankit.Today (@ankitv) December 14, 2020
"Today, at 3.47AM PT (Pacific Time), Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32AM PT. All services are now restored. We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future" a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
Can't even go on the Play Store to get a Google Maps alternative because the Play Store is down too
— Aroon Deep (@AroonDeep) December 14, 2020
The outage also underlined our heavy dependence on online services for work, education, and entertainment, especially amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
I’m sitting here in the dark in my toddler’s room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking... a lot right now.
— Joe Brown (@joemfbrown) December 14, 2020