Google hit by 7-hour global outage, e-mail and other services affected, Latest Singapore News - The New Paper
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Google hit by 7-hour global outage, e-mail and other services affected

This article is more than 12 months old

Google suffered a seven-hour global outage yesterday that affected many of its services, including e-mail, storage, document and videoconferencing.

The disruption hit users at a time when they needed the tools most to stay productive amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Many users, including those in Singapore, could not log into their Gmail accounts while some could not send or receive attachments.

Others could not create files in their Google Drive, post messages via Google Chat or record Meet videoconferencing sessions.

According to third-party web monitoring company Downdetector, problems with Google services were first reported at around noon yesterday.

Downdetector also recorded reports from around 10,000 affected users here, with the majority reporting problems logging in to their Gmail and sending and receiving e-mail attachments.

A live outage world map by the same firm showed that issues were mostly reported in Japan, India, parts of the United States, Europe and South-east Asian countries, including Singapore.

Google confirmed on its website at 1.29pm yesterday that it was investigating an issue with Gmail.

At 3.21pm, the company updated that advisory, saying that it was investigating issues with Gmail sending, Meet recording, and creating files in Drive, among other things.

RESTORED

At around 7pm, Google reported that services were restored. A check on the status dashboard of its services on the company website also showed that all were functioning normally by then.

Apologising for the inconvenience caused, Google said on its website: "System reliability is a top priority at Google. We are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

The tech giant did not respond by press time to questions about the cause of the disruption and its redundancy plans.

Technology