Alphabet Inc's Google search was down for thousands of users on Monday, said reports. Apart from Google search, a range of Google products was also impacted, including Google Duo, Google Photos, Google Drive and Google Maps.
After a brief global disruption, services appeared to be back up, Downdetector.com, an outage tracking website focused on the US, reported.
Users started reporting issues on Downdetector at around 9 pm New York time on Monday, which went up to over 40,000 an hour later, Bloomberg reported.
Acknowledging it as a software update issue, Google said a team had ‘worked quickly’ to address the fault to ensure that services were back running as normal.
“We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google search and Maps,” The Guardian quoted a spokesperson for the company as saying.
Although serious downtime in all Google-operated services is rare, this is not the first time that Google experienced such a service issue. Here is a look at the past incidents of international outages.
YouTube was down in 2018
A major international outage disrupted Google’s streaming service YouTube on October 16, 2018. The video service’s sites and mobile apps were down and remained inaccessible for over an hour. Services of YouTube TV and YouTube Music were also affected by the disruption. According to Downdetector, users in the US, Japan, Brazil, Southeast Asia, parts of Australia and Western Europe were affected.
Gmail, YouTube were down in June 2019
Services that rely on Google’s technology such as Gmail, YouTube and other services were disrupted for several hours on June 2, 2019, in the US, due to “high levels of network congestion.” Although it was not clear what caused the network problems, it affected more than a dozen Google services.
Gmail suffers outage in August 2020
On August 20, 2020, millions of users in India, Sri Lanka, parts of the US, Japan, Malaysia, Australia and many other countries said they were unable to access Gmail and a suite of services by Google for about six hours. The international outage had abruptly disrupted services of Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Meet and Google Voice. Although Google did not publicly announce the reason for the disruption, it acknowledged the issue in its G Suite Status Dashboard.
YouTube was affected in November 2020
YouTube faced another worldwide outage on November 11, 2020, that prevented videos from loading for about an hour. The issue affected other services that use the YouTube infrastructure like YouTube TV, Google TV, Google Play, and YouTube Music.
Google services down in December 2020
Most Google services, including Gmail, YouTube and Google Drive suffered an outage for over an hour on December 14, 2020, across the world. Users were unable to access emails or were logged out of ongoing Google Meet sessions. The problem occurred due to a failure in Google Accounts and services were restored within an hour of the outage. A Google spokesperson said the outage was caused by “an internal storage quota issue”.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
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