In case you were wondering whether it’s your internet, no, it’s not. Google Services have indeed been hit by an outage and are down. This includes Google Docs, Gmail, Hangouts and YouTube among several others. Even Gmail profile pictures refuse to load.
The monitoring site Down Detector has over 5,000 reports of Google outages in the last minute or so, signaling that the problem could be worldwide [Update: The number of downdetector reports has now swelled to over 50,000]. Google has yet to issue a response. As of now, Google Search seems to be the only major product that is unaffected by the Google outage.
Google’s Health Dashboards have no indication of the outage yet. We’re monitoring this situation closely and will keep you updated on latest developments.
Update: Google has acknowledged the outage on its Dashboard, with this message: We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by 12/14/20, 5:42 PM IST detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.
The official YouTube account also acknowledged the outage with this tweet.
Update 2: Services are finally being restored. While the official Dashboard hasn’t been updated yet, we’re hearing reports that things are being restored back to normal. Gmail, Docs and Hangouts have begun working for some users. The cause of the outage still remains unknown.