Google has managed to restore its services including Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Drive and others after a nearly hour-long disruption that prevented users from across the world from accessing these platforms.
KEY FACTS
Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard shows that all of its major services are have been restored following outages across the board.
In its status update on each of the downed services, Google says the problems have been resolved for a vast majority of its users and it will “continue to work towards restoring service for the remaining affected users.”
Crowdsourced data on Downdetector.com showed that the outage had an impact on every major Google service including its smart home platform Nest.
Various services that rely on Google’s servers, including the game Pokemon Go and messaging platforms Discord, were also affected by the outage according to user complaints on Twitter.
Some users, however, managed to discover a workaround that allowed YouTube to work in Chrome’s incognito mode, which could imply that the outage was likely impacting Google accounts instead of the services themselves.
Forbes has reached out to Google for a comment.
BIG NUMBER
1.5 billion. That’s the total number of active Gmail users around the world as of October 2019, according to CNBC. Google’s email service is by far the biggest in the world with its closest rival, Microsoft’s Outlook hosting around 400 million active users as of 2019.
KEY BACKGROUND
Last month, YouTube was hit with a similar outage which prevented users from playing any videos on the platform. That issue was resolved in an hour, although the company did not provide any details as to what caused the outage. Similarly, last month, Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud service, faced an outage that disrupted large portions of the internet including platforms like Roku, Flickr and Spotify-owned podcast service Anchor. Apart from running their own web platforms internet majors like Google and Amazon also provide hosting, mapping, payments, and a multitude of other services to smaller platforms. A major outage at either of the two companies almost always has a cascading effect that affects the rest of the internet.
TANGENT
On Monday, the New York Times reported that Google has delayed plans to return to working from its offices by a few months, to September 2021. Beyond the current pandemic-enforced remote work period the company is also planning to make significant changes to its work policy. According to the Times, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent Alphabet told staffers in an email that Google will be testing the idea of a “flexible workweek” once it is safe to return to the office. Under this experimental plan, employees would be expected to work at least three days a week in the office for “collaboration days” while working from home the other days.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2020/12/14/major-google-services-including-gmail-youtube-experience-global-outage/
