Global outage hits G-mail, G Suite users

Hundreds of G-mail and G Suite users in India faced disruption on Thursday as some of the Google-owned platforms were hit by a global outage. The services were restored for all users by 4:40 pm (IST).

Earlier in the day, technical issues were noticed with multiple cloud services including Drive, Google Docs, Slides, Chat, Google Meet and Google Voice, according to the company’s G Suite Status Dashboard. The biggest impact were on G-mail users, many of whom could not complete their daily work.

“It was a major inconvenience today as being a small business, we highly rely on G Suite,” said Kashyap Soni, who runs a small CA firm in Rajkot. “One of my clients had an urgent matter that I needed to look into. Since the file was relatively larger and he wasn’t very tech-savvy, he had to come to my office, despite heavy rains, to give me the files in a flash drive. We wouldn't have had the same option for remote clients.”

Down Detector, a service that reports issues with such online platforms, received nearly 3,000 complaints from across the globe including India, Australia, Japan, UK and Germany. Two-fifth of the reported issues involved users being unable to send attachments and 29 per cent reported problems with logging in. Fifteen per cent said they were unable to receive chat messages. For Google Drive, the main issue was with file syncing, making up 68 per cent of all reported problems.

Nitya, a student pursuing MBA from a college in Mumbai, said: “We have our MBA internships coming up in a couple of months. Today, was the last date for submitting our CVs to be forwarded to prospective companies. It caused massive confusion and panic for a while among students. They had to then push back the deadline.”

Google did not disclose the nature of the glitch but apologised for the inconvenience.

Similar outage in March

Google had faced a similar outage back in March when services such as Gmail, Drive, YouTube, and other Google services were down for a few hours in some countries.

According to Down Detector, the outage has impacted Google’s services in  India, Australia, Japan, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and the US.

According to Google’s GSuite Status Dashboard, along with Gmail, other services such as Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Hangouts, Google Chat, Google Meet, Google Keep and Google Voice have also been impacted. 

“Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 8/20/20, 1:51 PM with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience,” Google said in an update.

The issues reported include Gmail sending issues, Meet recording issues, Creating files issues in Drive, CSV user upload issues in Admin Console and Posting message issues in Google Chat.