If you’re having trouble accessing Google Assistant, Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive or other Google apps, you’re not alone. According to DownDetector.com, all of these aforementioned apps are not working. We noticed the problem when trying to set a reminder using Google Assistant. On DownDetector, the number of complaints made by Google Search users rose from 7 to over 1300 in minutes.
The outage appears to be worse in the northeast U.S., parts of Texas and in Southern California. Overseas, parts of the U.K., Germany, and Austria are affected. And the problem isn’t limited to Google’s mobile apps as Google’s desktop apps also appear to be out of order.
UPDATE: Google has issued the following statement, “We are experiencing high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube. Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors. We believe we have identified the root cause of the congestion and expect to return to normal service shortly.”
UPDATE 2: Google has announced that the outage ended at 7pm EDT. The company released another statement: “The network congestion issue in eastern USA affecting Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube has been resolved for all affected users as of 4:00pm US/Pacific. We will conduct a post mortem and make appropriate improvements to our systems to prevent this from happening again. We sincerely apologize to those that were impacted by today’s issues. Customers can always find the most recent updates on our systems on our status dashboard.”
We’d suggest that you calmly find some videos on YouTube to stream while waiting for Google to fix whatever ails it. However, YouTube is a Google app and the number of complaints related to the app soared from 16 to over 20,000 in minutes. 42% of those who complained said that they can’t watch videos, 29% can’t open the YouTube website and 28% are not able to log in.