Millions of users across multiple countries were unable to access their Gmail inboxes, Google documents, and YouTube as the Google suite of products went down for 30 minutes on Monday night.
Downtime indicator sites showed big spikes for outages from about 11pm AEDT, across Europe, the Americas and Asia.
Users who attempted to access Gmail received a ‘Temporary Error’ message.
“We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologise for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes,” it read.
YouTube’s main page had defaulted to a cartoon of a chimp bearing the message “Something went wrong”. But the video-sharing site appeared to work if users accessed it from ‘Incognito’ or ‘Private’ mode on their browsers.
Many users in Australia reported the services started to come back from about 11.30pm AEDT.
Outages are not uncommon for any website or provider, with companies including Google as well as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and others routinely experiencing them due to temporary server errors often caused by human error. But Monday’s outage is notable for its pervasiveness across the Alphabet portfolio.
The company’s search product was functioning correctly, and third-party ads – Google’s main revenue driver – remained visible in results, suggesting advertising was unaffected.
A spokesperson for Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The website DownDetector, which collates user-reported errors on websites, mobile networks and other platforms, was showing tens of thousands of complaints, extending to Google’s office tools such as Drive and Meet, Google Maps, and Google’s smart home products such as Nest.
