Google Services Including Gmail Suffer Disruption

Key services belonging to Alphabet’s Google division are being impacted by disruption that began shortly after 6.30am on Thursday morning.

And according to Downdetector.com, although there has been less disruption, services are still being impacted around the world as of 2pm Thursday.

It comes after music streaming service Spotify, which coincidentally runs on the Google Cloud Platform, suffered a rare outage on Wednesday that left users around the world unable to enjoy music playback.

Google outage

The outage of Google’s service is however more serious for the millions of people who are working from home during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Organisations have increasingly adapted to using cloud services from the likes of Google for staff operating at remote locations.

Disruption with the Google service has meant that users were unable to upload files to Google Drive or YoutTube, or create new emails with Gmail.

And Google was not exactly reassuring when it said that its service had been restored for some users.

“Gmail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future,” Google reported said on its Gmail dashboard. “Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”

It then provided a little bit more information in its Gmail service webpage.

“The problem with Gmail should be resolved,” it wrote at 12.10pm. “we apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”

“System reliability is a top priority at Google,” it added. “We are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”

So no explanation of what went wrong then.

Other problems

Google has experienced outages before with its services including search, Gmail, and Youtube.

In June 2019 for example, Google’s online tools such as Gmail and YouTube, as well as those of third-parties, including Snapchat and Vimeo, suffered disruption.

Google at the time blamed high levels of network congestion on the East Coast of the US, as being behind that outage.