Gmail – the world’s most used application for emailing faced a global outage earlier yesterday, August 20. Google, confirming that the services were down globally, managed to restore the same, which now is reportedly working smoothly.
According to reports, several users began facing issues with Google’s email service, Gmail, around 10am IST. Over 2000 complaint reports began pouring in from the morning.
Down Detector – an application that offers a real-time problem and outage monitoring – showed several complaints were received about the email services not working. Further, it also showed that the issue was not restricted to just some countries, but had impacted users across the globe.
The problem with Gmail resulted in people not being able to attach files and any other documents, either through email or even on their Google Drives. Moreover, some said that attachments were uploading very slowly.
The outage however wasn’t limited to just the Gmail services but was also reported across the other services such as Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Meet. The email services though were the most affected.
The news of the outage initially broke on Twitter, with several users complaining of not being able to get access to their emails, along with failed attachment uploads. Users kept receiving an error showing, “the operation couldn’t be completed.”
After noticing the issue, Google issued a statement saying, “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shorty.”
Considering the prevalent situation of the pandemic and with many people implementing a ‘work from home’ culture, many users faced issues as email services are a vital communication link for businesses and other enterprises.
The global outage, which lasted for almost four hours, was at its peak at around 12pm IST, with over 2700 users reporting the issue.
The services were later restored by evening, according to Google in their statement. “We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support,” Google said. However, Google did not offer any explanation as to why the services were disrupted
This is the second such instance of a widespread issue, as in July, users were unable to log in into their Gmail accounts. Google had noted this issue, and fixed it, however, it then also did not issue any statement on why the problems occurred.
Additionally, WhatsApp also faced a similar server-end outage through the intervening night of August 20 and 21. Users complained of messages not going through. The services are restored now though. This however was faced irregularly and not wasn’t a global outage.
