Google services outages

During eight episodes, one in 2013, one in 2014, one in 2018, three in 2020, and two in 2022, Google suffered from severe outages that disrupted a variety of their services. The first was a five-minute outage of every Google service in August 2013. The second was a 25-minute outage of Gmail, Google+, Google Calendar, and Google Docs in January 2014. The third was a YouTube outage in October 2018. The fourth was a Gmail/Google Drive outage in August 2020. The fifth, in November 2020, affected mainly YouTube, and the sixth, in December 2020, affected most of their services. The seventh, in August 2022, affected Google Search, Maps, Drive and YouTube. The eighth affected Google Maps and Google Street View. These outages seemed to be global.

Google services outage

YouTube during the outage on October 16, 2018
Date	August 16, 2013 January 24, 2014 October 16, 2018 August 20, 2020 November 11, 2020 December 14, 2020 August 8, 2022 October 16, 2022
Time	Varies from any outages
Duration	Varies from any outages
Location	Worldwide
Target	Main target: Google Other targets: YouTube YouTube Music YouTube TV Gmail Google Drive Google Maps Google Docs Google+ Google Calendar Various Google services

August 2013 services outage

On 16 August 2013, every Google service went down for five minutes.^[1] The outage caused internet traffic to drop forty percent worldwide.^[2]

January 2014 services outage

On 24 January 2014, Gmail, Google+, Google Calendar, and Google Docs suffered a 25-minute outage. A statement by Google described the cause:

At 10:55 a.m. PST this morning, an internal system that generates configurations—essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave—encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration. The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users’ requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors. Users began seeing these errors on affected services at 11:02 a.m., and at that time our internal monitoring alerted Google’s Site Reliability Team. Engineers were still debugging 12 minutes later when the same system, having automatically cleared the original error, generated a new correct configuration at 11:14 a.m. and began sending it; errors subsided rapidly starting at this time. By 11:30 a.m. the correct configuration was live everywhere and almost all users’ service was restored.^[3]

October 2018 YouTube outage

On 16 October 2018, a global outage disrupted YouTube for approximately one hour and 2 minutes, YouTube Music and YouTube TV were affected as well. When users try to open YouTube, the website only shows a blank page without videos. On the app, an error message read, “There was a problem with the network [503].”^[4]

During the outage, the hashtag #YouTubeDown was trending on Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms.^[5] The YouTube trending page was still accessible, though it was not possible to play any video. YouTube acknowledged that on Twitter.

Team YouTube	Twitter
@TeamYouTube

Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues. We're working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated.

16 Oct 2018^[6]

After 1 hour and 2 minutes of outage, YouTube was fixed.^[7]

August 2020 services outage

On 20 August 2020, over a period of approximately six hours, a global outage abruptly disrupted Google's suite of services, including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Meet and Google Voice.^[8] The outage is reported to have started around 06:30 UTC. Google acknowledged the worldwide disruption in the G Suite Status Dashboard.^[9] Users complained that they were unable to upload files to Gmail, transfer files, and upload files to Google Drive.^[10][11] There were also reports that some users were unable to log in to their Gmail accounts.^[12] The reason for the technical issue is not publicly known.^[13]

November 2020 YouTube/Google TV outage

On 11 November 2020, another outage occurred on YouTube, YouTube Music, YouTube TV, Google TV and Google Play. The outage started at roughly 12:20 UTC. Users experienced problems playing videos, error messages, and errors that caused loading loops. At 04:13 UTC, YouTube gave the all-clear on its Twitter.^[14][15][16]

December 2020 services outage

On 14 December 2020, another global outage occurred, affecting authenticated users of most Google services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Play.^[17][18] The problem was due to a failure in Google Accounts; services such as YouTube were still accessible with private browsing.^[19] Google Workspace Status Dashboard showed all services as operational for approximately 40 minutes before correctly reporting their status as down.^[20] The outage started at approximately 11:45 UTC, and Google services were restored around 13:00 UTC.

Google identified the issue as an accidental reduction of capacity on their central user ID management system, causing requests that required OAuth-based authentication to fail; this also included the Google Cloud Platform.^[21]

On 15 December 2020, many emails sent to Gmail servers reported a 550 error code, which incorrectly indicates that the email address does not exist.^[22]

August 2022 services outage

 

Google internal 500 error shows at August 9, 2022

On 8 August 2022, Google Search, Maps, Drive and YouTube went down, returning HTTP 500 and HTTP 502 errors.^[23][24] After their services went back online, Google apologised and stated that a software update issue was to blame.^[25][26]

October 2022 Google Maps outage

On 16 October 2022, Google Maps and Street View went down, resulting in an inability for photos to load and an inability for Street View to function.^[27]

See also

• Criticism of Google
• 2021 Facebook outage
• Microsoft Azure Outages
• Amazon Web Services Outages
• Downtime

References

1. Svetlik, Joe. "Google goes down for 5 minutes, Internet traffic drops 40%". CNET. Retrieved 3 November 2022.
2. "Google goes down for a few minutes, web traffic drops 40 percent". Wired UK. ISSN 1357-0978. Retrieved 3 November 2022.
3. "Today's outage for several Google services". Google. 24 January 2014. Retrieved 3 November 2022.
4. "Google's YouTube suffers a major outage". CNBC. 16 October 2018.
5. "YouTube down: Major outage prompts outcry on social media". FOX13. 16 October 2018.
6. Team YouTube [@TeamYouTube] (16 October 2018). "Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues. We're working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
7. "YouTube was down but now it's back". TechCrunch. Retrieved 16 October 2018.
8. "Google services including Gmail hit by serious disruption". Sky News. Retrieved 20 August 2020.
9. "Gmail, Drive, Meet, Other Google Services Facing Global Outage". NDTV Gadgets 360. Retrieved 20 August 2020.
10. Page, Carly. "Gmail Down: Google Services Suffer Global Outage". Forbes. Retrieved 20 August 2020.
11. "Google services down globally, Gmail, Drive worst affected". The New Indian Express. Retrieved 20 August 2020.
12. "Google suffers Gmail and Drive outage worldwide after a week of Australian controversy". NewsComAu. 20 August 2020. Retrieved 20 August 2020.
13. "Gmail experiencing worldwide service disruption". Daily News. Retrieved 20 August 2020.
14. Li, Abner (12 November 2020). "YouTube is currently down amid widespread outage". 9to5Google. Retrieved 12 November 2020.
15. "After massive outage, YouTube is back online". Android Police. 12 November 2020. Retrieved 12 November 2020.
16. "YouTube went down around the world, but it's now fixed". 11 November 2020.
17. Lunden, Ingrid (14 December 2020). "Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs and other services go down simultaneously in multiple countries". TechCrunch.
18. McCann, John (14 December 2020). "YouTube, Gmail, Google Workspace and other services are down". TechRadar.
19. Hern, Alex (14 December 2020). "Google suffers global outage with Gmail, YouTube and majority of services affected". The Guardian. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
20. "Google Workspace Status Dashboard". archive.is. 14 December 2020. Archived from the original on 14 December 2020. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
21. "Google Cloud Status Dashboard". status.cloud.google.com. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
22. "Gmail is broken right now, one day after a massive outage (Update: Fixed?)". TechCrunch. 15 December 2020. Retrieved 16 December 2020.
23. "Google Search, Maps, Photos, Drive, YouTube Experiencing Outages in Some Parts of the World | Technology News". Gadgets 360. Retrieved 9 August 2022.
24. "Google down for thousands of users". Reuters. 9 August 2022. Retrieved 9 August 2022.
25. Ng, Abigail (8 August 2022). "Google is back online after users around the world reported a brief outage". CNBC. from the original on 9 August 2022. Retrieved 9 August 2022.
26. Cassidy, Caitlin (9 August 2022). "Google outage: tech giant apologises after software update causes search engine to go down". The Guardian. from the original on 9 August 2022. Retrieved 9 August 2022.
27. "Is Google Maps down 10/16/2022. Why Google Maps is not working today? Whats up with Google Maps now?".