Several Google services suffer outages Thursday night

By: Kenneth G.

Several Google services, including Gmail, Hangouts and YouTube, briefly went down for many users across the US on Thursday night.

The outage-tracking website DownDetector received an influx of reports of interruptions to those services beginning shortly before 9 p.m. and peaking 15 minutes later.

A majority of those affected were located in major cities along the eastern coast of the US, according to the site.

Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, Urs Holzle, acknowledged the outage in several tweets.

“A pool of servers that route traffic to application backends crashed, and users on that particular pool experienced the outage,” he wrote.

Holzle added: “ We’re very sorry for the outage, we know how critical these services are to everyone’s lives. We’re working on a postmortem to ensure this won’t happen again.”

Google users on Twitter vented about the outages.

“What else could go wrong. Gmail, Google Drive, all down. Looks like it’s down worldwide? Thanks 2020,” wrote user Kyoko Kitamura.