Google services including Gmail and YouTube suffer outage

Google services including Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and Google Classroom suffered a widespread outage Monday, affecting many users and employers. Reports of the crash spiked around 6:30 a.m. Eastern time, according to DownDetector.

Google said the disruption ended at 7:32 Eastern. The search giant said that an "authentication system outage" lasted about 45 minutes and was "due to an internal storage quota issue," according to a spokesperson. 

"Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period," the spokesperson said. "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."  

The outage impacted people who rely on Google for work and personal communication, as well as schools, with some reporting on social media that students couldn't log into their Chromebooks — an issue for many students who are relying on remote instruction during the coronavirus pandemic. One Indianapolis high school said it was delaying classes two hours because of the problem.

Google users in multiple countries also took to social media to report their confusion and frustration with the outage, which Google didn't immediately acknowledge. In response to one user who reported that Gmail was down on Monday morning, Google said: "Currently, there are no disruptions with Gmail. Could you try connecting to a different network to see if that works? Keep us posted."

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• Google
• Gmail
• YouTube