Google Services, including YouTube, Gmail, and GSuite, were down for a noticeable amount of time Sunday, leaving many a lazy weekend afternoon unceremoniously disrupted.
The outage lasted for about four hours, starting just before 3 p.m. ET and ending around 7 p.m. Several reports, including a live map from DownDetector and comment from Google, reported by The Verge confirmed the issue. According to Google, the outage was caused by traffic congestion on its Cloud service. The outage also affected several services that work on the Google Cloud platform, including Snapchat, Uber, Discord, Vimeo, and others.
Users in both the Eastern and Western coasts of the U.S. and parts of Europe reported having trouble with a number of different apps and services. Many took to Twitter to share their grievances and several sarcastic memes. For a time the hashtags #YouTubeDown and #SnapchatDown were top trending terms on the social media platform.
I personally realized something was amiss just before 3 p.m. ET while attempting to access Youtube. I noted the page was loading slowly and that I wasn’t logged into my account on the home page. I attempted to sign in by clicking the sign in button but this took me to an error page. I then attempted to put in a search inquiry to test the extent of the issue. This pulled up YouTube search results with no major problems, albeit a lagged loading time for the page. I was able to open videos from the search results into new tabs and play them in full, however, the full pages would not load to show the video details, comments, or suggested videos.
Several sources have noted that downtime on Google services has become increasingly more common in the last year. There were issues with Google Home and Chromecast last June that lasted for almost eight hours, as well as several instances of YouTube, Gmail, and Nest outages between late 2018 and early 2019.
There is not much that can be deduced so far, but the duration of this incident coupled with the number of services that were affected is sure to be a major topic of discussion in the coming days.
Google has told several publications that it plans to do a post mortem on the incident to determine the exact cause of the outage and to figure out what improvements need to be made to its systems.
