News / Society

Gmail, YouTube, other Google services hit by widespread outage

Monday, 14 December 2020 1:03 PM [ Last Update: Monday, 14 December 2020 5:34 PM ]

Multiple Google services and websites including YouTube, Gmail, Google Assistant, and Google Docs have been hit with a widespread outage.

Gmail and other Google services, including video sharing platform YouTube, stopped working with widespread outages reported on Monday.

US-based technology giant Google said on Monday the issue affected “a majority" of the 1.5 billion users of its email platform.

The outage began at approximately 1150 GMT and ended by 1230 GMT.

Gmail users were greeted with a “Temporary Error” message when attempting to log into their Google account: “We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the G Suite Status Dashboard for the current status of the service.”

Google Assistant, Google Maps, Google Drive, and Google Docs were also hit with a widespread outage.

Within minutes, social media sites were awash with hashtags including #googledown and YouTubeDOWN as hundreds of millions of internet users tried vainly to connect to the US search engine, according to AFP.

Google said that services had been restored for some users and said services should soon be restored for all users.

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.

Outages on select Google apps are not uncommon, but Monday's outage affected all its popular services, including Google Hangouts, Google Chats and Google Meet, products that people have used extensively during the COVID-19 pandemic, Reuters reported.

Google's website that logs outages said the services that were affected for nearly an hour should be restored for most users.

The company has some of the most widely used services in the world. YouTube records over 2 billion logged-in users each month, with people watching over a billion hours of video on its platform.

"We're back up and running!," the video platform said in a tweet.

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