Gmail was one of a number of Google services that went down Monday.
Photo: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg News
More than a dozen Google services, including Gmail and YouTube, were offline in swaths of the globe Monday morning, interrupting access for both individuals and businesses.
The Alphabet Inc. GOOG 0.30% -owned company’s services showed errors for users attempting to sign in or access their emails or their files using Google’s Drive services, according to social-media postings from users. On YouTube, the home page was replaced with an illustration of a monkey with a hammer, with the title, “oops.”
A Google dashboard that displays the availability of Google services said that in addition to email and storage, apps including its calendar, videoconferencing tools, document-editing service and spreadsheets were offline as of 6:55 a.m. ET.
Service for the affected apps began to resume around 7:35 a.m.
The cause of the outage wasn’t immediately clear. A spokesman for Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The outage struck a chord for tens of millions of people who have had to stay home on and off for the better part of a year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Remote work and learning have left businesses and individuals more dependent than ever on online services, for which Google is one of the most widely used providers.
Google’s Gmail is one of the most popular email clients globally, and the company’s G Suite office tools, a competitor to Microsoft Corp.’s Office, is popular among businesses and institutions.
“Why g suite why? Why would you crash on a freakin Monday!! Oh wait #2020,” wrote one Twitter user.
In at least one newsroom that uses Google services, a reporter had to use an older technology—the telephone—to dictate the first paragraphs of a story on the outage.
Temporary interruptions to the availability of popular online services are relatively common occurrences, though their impact has increased as more businesses outsource their digital infrastructure and tools to outside businesses, often large internet companies. A decade ago, a Twitter Inc. outage—accompanied by an error image dubbed the “fail whale”—might have boosted office productivity. Today, outages can slow some companies to a crawl.
In November, Amazon.com Inc. grappled with an hourslong outage tied to its enormous cloud-computing operation that affected operations of many of its clients, such as video-streaming device company Roku Inc. In July, apps such as Spotify and Tinder experienced outages for several hours because of what Facebook Inc. said was a bug in its software for iPhone users.
In March 2019, some Google services including Gmail were slowed or inaccessible because of what the company called a “cascading failure” that began after its engineers made tweaks to an internal storage service. The same week, services from Apple Inc. and Facebook also suffered outages.
Write to Sam Schechner at [email protected]
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This post first appeared on wsj.com
