YouTube, Gmail and Other Google Services Go Down in Widespread Hour-Long Outage
UPDATED: Multiple Google services — including YouTube and Gmail — were unavailable for users across the globe Monday for about an hour due to what appeared to be widespread technical problems.
Also affected by the issues were Google Drive, Google Docs, Adwords and Adsense, Google Home, Nest and Google’s Chromecast services. User reports of problems accessing the services spanned North America, Europe, India, South Africa, Central and South America and Australia.
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“We are aware that many of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now — our team is aware and looking into it,” the YouTube account on Twitter posted at 7:09 a.m. ET. “We’ll update you here as soon as we have more news.”
A little over an hour later, YouTube said in a tweet, “We’re back up and running! You should be able to access YouTube again and enjoy videos as normal.”
What apparently caused the problems: According to a post on the Google Cloud account on Twitter, “Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue.” The outage started at 6:47 a.m. ET and was resolved at 7:32 a.m., according to the tweet.
On Dec. 14, problems reported by YouTube users spiked just before 7 a.m. ET, according to DownDetector.com. Within an hour, those tapered off as the video platform began restoring service. About 80% of the issues reported by Gmail users were related to logging in, per DownDetector.
Monday’s Google service interruptions come after YouTube experienced problems on Nov. 11 in playing videos for about two hours in multiple regions worldwide. Such prolonged outages for major internet platforms have been rare. Given Google’s massive reach — with billions of users around the world — any availability issues the company encounters have a huge and immediate impact.
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