Gmail, YouTube, other Google services hit by service outage

Some of Google’s major products were hit by a service outage Thursday night among users predominantly located on the East Coast, according to outage monitoring site Downdetector.

The Downdetector heat maps for Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google’s search engine and other Google services showed large swaths of people had trouble accessing those websites starting at around 8:50 p.m. EDT on Thursday.

Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, acknowledged the outage in several tweets.

“A pool of servers that route traffic to application backends crashed, and users on that particular pool experienced the outage,” he tweeted. “We’re very sorry for the outage, we know how critical these services are to everyone’s lives. We’re working on a postmortem to ensure this won’t happen again.”

As has been noticed, several Google services were down for some users from 6:00 to 6:23 p.m. PDT. A pool of servers that route traffic to application backends crashed, and users on that particular pool experienced the outage. GCP was not affected.

— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) September 24, 2020

A Google Cloud spokesperson acknowledged the outage in a brief statement to The Hill. A person with knowledge of the situation told The New York Times they are investigating the cause of the outage and has ruled out a cyberattack. 

Google Classroom was among the products affected, causing students and parents to voice fvoice frustration on social media.

“GOOGLE CLASSROOM IS DOWN CAN I HAVE ONE NIGHT WHERE I SUBMIT MY HOMEWORK ON TIME PLEASE,” one Twitter user wrote.

GOOGLE CLASSROOM IS DOWN CAN I HAVE ONE NIGHT WHERE I SUBMIT MY HOMEWORK ON TIME PLEASE pic.twitter.com/z2UV2L5DmN

— maggie (@shalexandejs) September 25, 2020