Google services including Gmail and YouTube start to return after outage

 

Google applications including YouTube, email and Docs have suffered a rare service outage, with users unable to access many of the company's services.

The outage started shortly before noon UK time, lasting quite half an hour before services were restored.

Users round the world reported problems with Gmail, Google Drive, the Android Play Store, Maps and more.

Google's program , however, remained unaffected by the issues affecting its other services.

Google said the matter hit its authentication system, which is employed for logging in and similar functions, and lasted about 45 minutes.

Users were still ready to access the websites' landing pages in "incognito mode", which doesn't store a log of the users' browsing activity.

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The brief outage had a big impact on the company's many users, many of whom believe Google services for basic work apps like email and calendars.

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Users of Google Docs could still work if that they had synced documents offline but were unable to use any online features.

The outage also affected Google-connected smart devices like Home speakers - leading some users to complain on social media of being unable to modify off some lights in their homes.

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It also had a consequence on other apps, with players of the smartphone game Pokémon Go, for instance , reporting being unable to log in.

Despite the widespread outage, Google's service dashboard initially showed no errors - before switching to red status across all services.

"We're conscious of a drag with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail," the statement said, with the word "Gmail" replaced by other services.

Analysis box by Rory Cellan-Jones, technology correspondent

The Google crisis may are brief - it took services offline for fewer than an hour - but it had been an unnerving reminder of just how dependent many people became on services within the cloud.

Anyone who tried to open a Google Document or answer an urgent Gmail message will have felt a way of dread when the message came back: "Please try reloading this page, or returning thereto during a jiffy . We're pitying the inconvenience."

The pandemic has shown us just how valuable services just like the Google Cloud Platform are often to stay a workforce collaborating productively from home.

But the companies that have opted for Google's Cloud will are troubled by today's incident - however brief. they're going to want to understand exactly what went wrong and to urge assurances that it won't happen again.

"All services are now restored," Google said during a statement.

"We apologise to everyone affected, and that we will conduct a radical follow-up review to make sure this problem cannot recur within the future."

Such failures in Google's systems are rare, though a drag with some servers caused difficulties for US users in June 2019.

In that instance, the culprit was a change to server settings that was alleged to are applied to a couple of machines during a specific region but was accidentally applied to several more.