Google Outage: YouTube, Gmail Users ‘Experienced Error Messages’

Google’s infrastructure recently experienced some problems that affected Youtube, Gmail and other services and apps of the company. The outage and error issues impacted many of its users all over the world. Here’s what we know about Google's recent service outage.

According to Google’s status pages, the company’s services and apps experienced some problems that prevented users from accessing emails, uploading videos and using other services. The affected programs were Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Hangouts, Google Chat, Google Voice, Google Meet and even Youtube. Third-party apps and services that rely on Google’s infrastructure were affected, as well.

Thankfully, the whole problem was fixed at around 7:30 p.m. ET. Google Suite app kept users updated while the company fixed the problems and indicated if some users could already start using the specific service again. The company also sent out updates on the problems that may have emerged while it was handling the problem on their end.

Aside from the affected Google Suite apps, Google also noted that its Google Sync for Mobile and Google Realtime API were also down, but they were fixed at the same time as the other apps. The TeamYoutube Twitter account also confirmed that the video site’s backend problems were repaired around the same time as the Google apps.

On the other hand, Apple’s iCloud services weren’t having any issues on their end. Only 1 percent of iCloud users reportedly felt any slowdown during the outage.

Google’s correspondence with cloud server issues is important once the Google Stadia gaming platform gets released. Stadia is designed to “stream” a whole game while cloud servers hold all the files needed to run it. The platform is expected to alleviate the processing stress on the user’s computer through these cloud servers. However, this system is also expected to require high quality internet connection to work.

For now, we’ll see if Google can keep up with this pace when it comes to fixing problems on its services. Most of the problems related to the latest outing started at around 3:51 AM ET and were fixed in three and a half hours. This is not bad considering that more than five of Google’s apps experienced the problem simultaneously, but they were all fixed at the same time, too.