Update: As of 6:40PM IST, Google has confirmed that all of its services, including YouTube, Gmail, Drive and others have started working normally again. The Google Workspace Dashboard reflects the normal working status, and News18 can independently verify too that Gmail, Drive and YouTube services are working as per usual again, across iOS, Android and desktop platforms.
Google has confirmed that all of its services are facing an outage at the moment. Google’s workspace status dashboard, which keeps a track of the working status of all its consumer facing apps, has officially showed that all consumer services offered by Google, which includes Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Meet and other apps are all down at the moment, and that the outage is global in nature and isn’t just restricted to India. A Google India spokesperson could not offer further information to News18 at the moment, in terms of by when might Google’s services be brought back online, or what the causing factor for the crash may be.
Earlier, users took to social media platforms to state that YouTube, Gmail, Meet and other popular Google apps and services were not working in India. This coincided with reports on website and server outage tracker Downdetector, which also states that there is a clear spike in the number of reports on a possible server outage for Google India, from around 5PM IST. Subsequently, Google and its associated handles have now confirmed this downtime, and has issued statements acknowledging the app crashes.
Interestingly, while all Google services including Gmail and Drive are down on iOS, Android and desktop web browsers right now, YouTube still appears to be working on desktop platforms all along. It is not clear if the server outage did not affect YouTube’s desktop service at all, or if this is an intermittent incident. Some users have also started reporting that select Google services including Gmail are also starting to work already. Google officials did not have any specific information to share regarding the downtime, as of publishing the story.
Server downtimes of major apps are pretty common, and may happen owing to a large number of reasons. The most common of these include scheduled maintenance, minor system bugs that interrupt information delay from the remote servers, and so on. In extreme or exceptional cases, such outage may also represent coordinated cyber attacks, such as the cryptocurrency attack on Twitter that saw accounts of many public figures being hacked. Given the present climate of cyber security, such a prospect cannot be ruled out, either. However, the exact reason and the overall duration of downtime for Google services in India remains to be seen.
Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News here
Comments
0 comment