Internet search giant Google and many of its services including Gmail, YouTube, Drive and Docs faced a simultaneous global outage on Monday afternoon. Several users took to social media on Monday afternoon around 5.30 pm to share that Google's webpages were redirecting to an error page. According to the Down Detector, issues at Google began around 5 pm. The outage was reported by users across the globe. Some users said that Google Pay wasn't working either. The outage lasted about an hour before it was restored by Google.
During the outage, users said on social media that a '500 error' was displayed when they tried to search for something on Google. “There was an error. Please try again later. That’s all we know” was a message that many got.
YouTube displayed a ‘Something went wrong...’ error on its homepage, while Gmail displayed ‘Oops… the system encountered a problem (#2014)’. Google Drive and its apps such as Docs, Sheets etc weren’t working either, the page displayed the message, ‘Google Docs encountered an error. Please try reloading this page or coming back to it in a few minutes.’
YouTube said on Twitter that the team is looking into the issue.
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
Google confirmed that Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Sites, Google Groups, Classic Hangouts, Google Chat, Google Meet, Google Vault, Currents, Google Forms, Google Cloud Search, Google Keep, Google Tasks and Google Voice were all affected by the outage.
"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by 12/14/20, 5:42 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change," a message on Google's Workspace Dashboard said.
#YouTubeDOWN
— Maz⁷+⁵+⁷ (@YooniYoonji) December 14, 2020
I went to check everything that is linked to my google account and everything is gone. @YouTube please fix this......... pic.twitter.com/DgSMXCnvrS
#Google products; Nest, Gmail, Docs, Youtube, Google Assistant, and maybe other information based services are down #YouTubeDOWN #googledown #CyberSecurity pic.twitter.com/Kxhy6VzSMH
— snoɯʎuouA (@ERLNCINAR) December 14, 2020
Gmail server seems to be down. Google Drive and YouTube are also down... Anyone else facing this issue?#Google #googledrive #Gmail #googledown #glitch #YouTube pic.twitter.com/5VFWP4qpOY
— Abdullah Ashraf (@Abdulla77068818) December 14, 2020
The day came. When you can’t even google what happened with google.
— Kaushal Balte (@kaushal_balte) December 14, 2020
It’s still 2020.#googledown pic.twitter.com/8YrwuvOGVP
The engineer at Google who approved the last PR#google pic.twitter.com/k0TCqDakBK
— Tapan Chudasama (@tapanchudasama7) December 14, 2020
An update at 6 pm on Google's Workspace Dashboard stated, "Gmail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change." Other services were also gradually restored.
Earlier in August, a glitch was reported in Gmail and several users had shared then that their emails were not going through. Many had said they were not able to send across their emails, especially those which had files attached. Other users had then also said that they were facing issues with Google’s G-suite services, like Google Drive and Google Docs as well.