It’s Not Just You: A Worldwide Google Outage Caused Errors With Gmail, Google Docs, and More

Not OK, computer.
Not OK, computer. | Andrea Piacquadio, Pexels

Last night, internet users from all over the world took to social media and sites like DownDetector to report glitches with Gmail and other Google services. According to The Verge, the details varied—some people couldn’t upload files, while others couldn’t even compose an email—and at 1:29 a.m. EST, Google confirmed on its apps status dashboard that it was investigating the issues.

It soon became clear that the errors were affecting many Google apps. Google posted updates at 3:21 a.m. EST and 4:38 a.m. EST that listed the malfunctions: People had trouble creating files in Google Drive, recording Google Meets, sending messages in Google Chat, uploading CSV files in Admin Console, and more.

There wasn’t much for people to do but wait patiently for Google’s tech geniuses to restore order. Fortunately, salvation came soon—Google reported at 5:40 a.m. EST that systems were already running smoothly for some users, and they were repaired for everyone by 7:10 a.m. That said, anyone still experiencing an issue should report it here.

According to Engadget, YouTube users also encountered technical problems last night, and the video platform confirmed on Twitter that its team is currently “working on a fix” for processing delays on video uploads.

All in all, it was a rocky night (or morning, afternoon, or evening, depending on your time zone) online, and you can definitely send this article to your manager as an excuse for failing to submit whatever work they were expecting from you in the past 12 hours.