MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Google restores services after a widespread outage around the world on Monday

Google’s website that logs outages said the services that were affected for nearly an hour should be restored for the “vast majority” of users.

Services from Alphabet Inc’s Google were restored for most users on Monday after it experienced widespread outages around the world, preventing people from accessing Gmail, YouTube and other products.

Google’s website that logs outages said the services that were affected for nearly an hour should be restored for the “vast majority” of users.

“We will continue to work toward restoring service for the remaining affected users,” it wrote in a post on its service status page. It did not say what caused the problems.

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, with errors ranging from “something went wrong”, to “there was an error. Please try again later”, when attempting to log into the company’s mail product from about 6.30am in New York.

Google tools had failing to load for users in the United States, Britain and across Europe and Asia, but began functioning again for many people after about an hour.

Outages are not uncommon for any website or provider, with companies including Google as well as Apple, Amazon.com, Microsoft and others routinely experiencing them due to temporary server errors often caused by human error.

But Monday’s outage is notable for its pervasiveness across the Alphabet portfolio, affecting all its popular services, including Google Hangouts, Google Chats and Google Meet, products that people have used extensively during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The company’s search product functioned correctly throughout, though, and third-party ads – Google’s main revenue driver – remained visible in results, suggesting advertising was unaffected.

The website DownDetector, which collates user-reported errors on websites, mobile networks and other platforms, showed tens of thousands of complaints around 7am in New York, extending to Google’s office tools such as Drive and Meet, Google Maps, and Google’s smart home products such as Nest.

More than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, the site showed.

The Google errors on Monday had an additional ramification for consumers who use its Home service to control smart devices, such as house lights – numerous users complained on Twitter that they had been plunged into darkness.

In November, Amazon.com’s cloud-computing division suffered an outage that affected the ability of customers to use roughly two dozen services, hitting streaming hardware maker Roku, software seller Adobe and digital photo service Flickr.