Global outage affects Gmail, YouTube

CALIFORNIA: Google services, including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive, were restored for most users on Monday, following a global outage that affected thousands.

Google’s website that logs outages said the services that were affected for nearly an hour should be restored for most users. The company has some of the most widely used services in the world. YouTube records over 2 billion logged-in users each month, with people watching over a billion hours of video on its platform.

“We’re back up and running!,” the video platform said in a tweet. It had earlier tweeted that many users were having issues accessing YouTube. According to the outage monitoring website DownDetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the United States, Europe and India.

Outages on select Google apps are not uncommon, but Monday’s outage affected all its popular services, including Google Hangouts, Google Chats and Google Meet — products that people have used extensively during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The inability to sign in prevented users accessing other platforms through Google, including mobile videogames.

The disruption was an early jolt on the East Coast for parents who were waking children up for school on Monday.

Millions of students are relying on Google for online instruction during the pandemic, including platforms like Google Docs.