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Summary
- Prime Google applications -- Gmail, YouTube and Google Drive -- faced an outage due to suspected technical problems
- Thousands of complaints popped up as 90 per cent of users could not log in
- This is the fourth such major outage of services in the past six months. Last time it was in July
The services of global tech conglomerate Google were down for the fourth time this year after 90 per cent of the users failed to log in into prime Google applications, such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google TV and Google Play. Although the Google search engine was unaffected and was working well.
As per the website tracker site Downdetector, YouTube was the most affected due to outage and received the most complaints. The one-hour outage affected millions of users and companies across the world disrupting daily work. The cause of the outage is unclear and the actual impact on businesses would be ascertained in some time, experts said.
Gmail users received a message saying that: “We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes." However, some reports said that the services were working fine when opened in incognito mode.
(Image Source: ©Kalkine Group 2020)
Fourth outage in six months
The first such outage of major services of Google happened in July when Gmail services were down. The second time it happened was in August, third in November and the fourth time on 14th of December.
No technical reasons had been given out by Google so far for the latest outage, but it seems that the problem is stemming from Google accounts. Users who have tried to access these services in private browsing mode have not witnessed any disruptions, however, Google workspace status dashboard reported its status as down.
Google products and its reach
Google applications like Google suit, Gmail and YouTube are some of the largest used online services around the world. Enterprises use these services as they are cost effective and reliable as compared to applications provided by Google competitors.
Even though the outage was for an hour, the pandemic displayed how critical Google Cloud Platform was to most businesses which are interconnected in a ‘work from home’ scenario.
It remains to be seen how the stocks of the company trade today as investors react to this news at the business day opening in NASDAQ.
(Source: Refinitiv, Thomson Reuters)
