Google Resolves Four-Hour Outage Affecting YouTube, Gmail, and Cloud Services
Google confirms that severe network congestion in the eastern United States causes a widespread four-hour outage across its major platforms. The disruption impacts YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, and numerous other consumer and cloud services.
Google experiences a major four-hour outage that disrupts YouTube, Gmail, Google Calendar, and nearly all of its consumer-facing services. The company attributes the widespread connectivity failures to high levels of network congestion in the eastern United States, which significantly impacts Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube infrastructures.
The disruption prevents users from accessing essential tools like Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Hangouts, Keep, and Voice. Additionally, Google's internal backbone engines, including Cloud Service and Compute Engine, report severe issues during this timeframe, leaving countless individuals and businesses without critical communication and workflow capabilities.
Web monitoring services detect the connection failures at around 3 p.m., prompting a flood of complaints from affected users on social media. By 7:30 p.m., Google confirms that the issue is resolved for the vast majority of users and expects a full return to normal operations shortly, noting that the problems coincide with similar outages from internet provider Level 3 Communications.