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Google outage takes out Gmail, YouTube, Meet, Classroom, Stadia, and more

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David Meyer
David Meyer
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David Meyer
David Meyer
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December 14, 2020, 8:16 AM ET
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Google suffered a service outage Monday morning that lasted at least an hour.

The problem struck around 6:30 a.m. ET, affecting most of Google’s services with the notable exceptions of Search and Chrome; Gmail, Calendar, Drive, YouTube, Stadia, Meet, and Classroom were all out of action.

Some services, such as Gmail, were down for about two hours for some users.

Although the company has not yet explained the incident, Google’s rare outage comes at a particularly inopportune time: As a result of the pandemic, some of its work-related services have become crucial to many people.

Also deeply inconvenient: The outage took out Google’s smart devices.

So we had to manually turn on our bedside lights because Google Home was also down. Such weird dependencies in this age of cloud, digital assistants, and smart homes.

— @drei@aus.social (@_drei) December 14, 2020

For around half an hour at the start of the outage, Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard showed no issues. Then it became a sea of red—a situation that persisted even after some of the services began to reappear for many users.

“We are aware that many of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now,” the video site’s Twitter account announced shortly after 7 a.m. ET. “Our team is aware and looking into it. We’ll update you here as soon as we have more news.”

YouTube then became one of the first Google services to reappear, before the dashboard became a sea of green again.

Google had not responded to a request for comment. However, as the BBC noted, this may be because its communications team uses Gmail.

This article was updated to note how long some of the service outages lasted.

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