Gmail, YouTube, other Google services hit with massive outage

By: Noah M.

Google services including Gmail and YouTube suffered a massive outage early Monday morning that briefly shut users around the world out of their accounts.

The 45-minute outage disabled all of Google’s Workspace services — including Google Calendar, Google Drive and the Google Meet videoconferencing tool — at the start of the workweek along with the tech titan’s flagship email platform and video-sharing site.

Google said an “internal storage quota issue” caused the outage to its authentication system from 6:47 a.m. to 7:32 a.m. Eastern time. Services that required users to log in “experienced high error rates” during that time period, the Silicon Valley giant said.

“All services are now restored,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

The problems were most widely reported in Europe and the East Coast of the US but users also flagged problems in India, Japan and parts of South America, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.

Gmail users received error messages saying their accounts were unavailable when trying to access their emails, according to Twitter posts about the problems. For instance, the service said it “couldn’t find your Google account” when one reporter attempted to log into his Gmail account.

The YouTube homepage was also disabled — it currently shows a cartoon image of a monkey holding a hammer with the message, “Something went wrong…”