Update – Google services recover after going down in worldwide outage
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(Reuters) -Many services from Alphabet Inc, including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive, were down for thousands of users across the globe on Monday.
The company’s video platform did not load for users and had an error message: “Something went wrong…”.
According to outage monitoring website DownDetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India.
Despite the universal nature of the outages, the company’s automated systems reported no problems for any services for the first 30 minutes of the outage, across both consumer-facing and its cloud tools for developers. At 12.25pm, the company published an update, saying “We’re aware of a problem … affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access [Google services].”
The outage appeared to be related to the company’s authentication tools, which manage how users log in to services run by both Google and third-party developers.
The outage severely disrupted services for many workplaces. Google Suite, one of the services affected, manages not only email communication, but also intra-office messaging through the Chat and Meet services, and actual work through Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.
Even those who use other services experienced problems. Workers reliant on Slack, for instance – the Salesforce-owned chat app – could only talk to colleagues who were already logged in at the time of the outage.
For those working from home, the outage affected Google’s Smart Home services, including the Google Home smart speakers and the Nest thermostats and smoke alarms. While they operate in a fail-safe mode, users cannot access the services through an app to change their settings.
Alphabet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
