Google hit by global crash with Gmail, YouTube and other services down

Hundreds of thousands of users were locked out of accounts and services for almost an hour on Monday

Google appeared to have multiple services down on Monday. AP

Google users around the world faced disruption to services on Monday with Gmail, Google Drive and YouTube apparently down in dozens of countries.

Users received error messages with the failure quickly trending on social media accounts from locations around the globe.

All of the services are run by Google's parent company Alphabet.

Errors ranged from “something went wrong” on YouTube, to “there was an error. Please Try again later. That’s all we know,” when attempting to log in to the company’s mail product. Google products were failing to load for users in New York, the UK and across Europe.

Problems were first reported at 11.48am GMT on Monday and were back up in a little under an hour.

“Today, at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue," a statement from Google read.

"Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32AM PT. All services are now restored. We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

Internet monitoring tool DownDetector.com showed most complaints were from users in Europe, followed by the US eastern seaboard, Japan, east Asia and Russia.

Other services that were down included Google Classroom – which has been widely used since the start of the coronavirus outbreak – Google Play and Google Hangouts.

The hit mobile game Pokemon Go also impacted, DownDetector showed, presumably as users struggled to log in to Gmail accounts.

Crashes are not uncommon for major websites or internet providers and are often not the result of hacking or any other form of attack.

Companies including Google, Apple, Amazon.com, Microsoft, and others routinely experience them because of temporary server failures often caused by human error.

But Monday’s crash is notable for its pervasiveness across the Alphabet portfolio.

Despite that, Google's main search engine – used by billions every day – appeared to be functioning correctly throughout, and third-party ads – the main source of income for the tech giant – remained visible in various results.

Downdetector.com noted that about 260,000 users reported problems with accessing YouTube in 20 minutes from when services dropped out at about 11.48am GMT. About 86,000 users reported Gmail issues, while 122,000 reported problems accessing Google.com.

YouTube 2018 crash

The outage on Monday appeared to be the most significant for Google since October 2018, when YouTube went down for nearly two hours.

The service, which accounts for billions of dollars in revenue, was fixed after its "highly trained monkeys ... [were] dispatched to deal with this situation", the company said at the time.