It wasn’t just you — a widespread outage of Gmail and other Google services, such as YouTube, was reported early Monday morning. Around an hour later the company said services were being restored “for the vast majority of affected users.”
“We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users,” Google initially said just after 7 a.m. on its Workspace Status Dashboard, which also showed network outages for a host of other Google services, including YouTube, Google Drive, Google Classroom, Nest, and Google Home services, as well as gaming platform Stadia, Google Maps, Google Hangouts, and the Google Play Store on Android mobile phones. Even the popular mobile game Pokémon Go reportedly had problems.
Advertisement
The outage came early Monday morning as the country was preparing for the start of another work week. Likewise, students across the United States using Google Classroom, Google Meet, or Google Hangouts for remote learning purposes during the COVID-19 pandemic also had trouble connecting to the services. In Massachusetts, Stoughton Public Schools and the Silver Lake Regional School District sent e-mails to users acknowledging the outage and follow-ups encouraging users to try signing back in once the issues were reported as resolved.
The website Downdetector measured a significant spike in users reporting problems connecting to Gmail, as well as a host of other Google services. The site monitors the network status of various other websites and Internet services by combing social media and other sources.
By 7:52 a.m., Google said the network issues had been fixed and services were being restored to most users. “Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”
Many locked-out users took to social media during the outage to vent their frustration, some in a more tongue-in-cheek manner than others.
Advertisement
It looks like you’re having a mental breakdown about gmail huh pic.twitter.com/GoqeJZPuAg
— blaire erskine (@blaireerskine) December 14, 2020
Rob DeCola can be reached at robert.decola@globe.com. Follow him @robdecola.