Google’s core services like YouTube, Gmail were down due to a server congestion, which also impacted the messaging app Snapchat. (Image source: Bloomberg)Google’s core services like YouTube, Gmail were down for users in the US on Sunday afternoon (early Monday morning India time) and the company blamed network congestion in east United States for the problem. The Google Cloud outage also impacted Snapchat, which relies on the company’s cloud services, and Snapchat also said it was aware of the issue.
Google’s app status dashboard, where one can see if all the services are up and running shows Service outage for most of the company’s services. This full list of impacted services includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google Sites, Google Groups, Google Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Google Forms, Google Tasks, Keep and Google Voice. YouTube was also impacted by this outage.
According to Reuters, Google said that while it had resolved the network congestion in the eastern United States that affected services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube, it would conduct an investigation of the outage and make appropriate improvements to prevent or minimise future recurrence.
The company first identified the issue on its Google Cloud status dashboard at 3:25 p.m. Eastern time, and the problem was only fully resolved two hours later around 5 pm. According to the Gsuite app dashboard, Google said that while Gmail service was restored for some users, they expect a resolution for all users in the near future.
Read more: Google Play Store down: Users can’t browse or download apps
When the issue was first reported, Google’s app dashboard showed this message, “We continue to experience high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube. Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors. Our engineering teams have completed the first phase of their mitigation work and are currently implementing the second phase, after which we expect to return to normal service.”
Earlier on Saturday, Google’s Play Store was down with users unable to download or install apps to their smartphones. Google has yet to issue a statement on the Play Store being down, though it appears to be back up.
