Looks like we weren’t the only ones hitting the snooze button this morning. Several Google sites and services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, YouTube, and many more went down worldwide right before 7 AM ET this Monday morning. It didn’t take long for users to vent their frustrations when #YouTubeDOWN began trending on Twitter within minutes of the popular video-sharing site going down.
The issue was acknowledged by Google and has since been resolved with service being restored for the “vast majority of affected users” at 7:52 AM ET. However, Google hasn’t yet revealed the cause of the issue. Currently, a look at the Google Workspace Status Dashboard shows everything lit up in green. That’s a far cry from how it looked earlier this morning with every service lit up in red.
If you’re lucky, you slept through the entire thing. However, I was not so lucky, and was greeted with error messages when first trying to load Gmail this morning. Many other users also reported having troubles with controlling their smart homes showing that Google Assistant was also affected.
One bright spot seemed to be that Google Search continued functioning throughout this outage. Also, YouTube continued working for users who signed out of their accounts or used incognito mode. Making it look like the main issue had something to do with Google login services.
Third-party services that rely on Google were also affected, such as Pokémon Go as shown by Downdetector. Don’t worry, it’s back online with everything else, now you can get back to catching them all.
The recent outage illustrates just how dependent many of us are on Google, myself included. When you can’t access your calendar, email, work documents, or even control the lights in your home; it can feel a bit paralyzing. Fortunately, this outage only lasted for an hour, but it’s a good lesson to always have a backup and to never rely fully on “the cloud”.