After the rather infamous Facebook and Instagram outage, Google was hit by outages in a host of countries around the world, with users reporting issues in Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts and Google Maps for several hours.
In a statement on their service website, Google said: “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or another unexpected behavior.”
Google reported that the issues had been resolved at 6:30 AM GMT.
Gmail has more than one billion users. Those affected by the outages were unable to send emails, receiving an error message that said “Message could not be sent. Check your network and try again”. Others experienced problems opening attachments.
During the outages, Google said that “customers will have issues accessing or attaching files in various products”, including “attaching or accessing attachments” to emails, “as well as accessing and saving draft emails and sending emails.” Google also confirmed there were issues with uploading and downloading files from Google Drive and uploading photos or attachments to Hangouts.
Google Maps also appeared to be experiencing issues, with users who tried to activate Street View mode seeing a black screen, instead of images of the location. This issue was not confirmed by Google on its G Suite dashboard.
Google did not confirm the cause of the problem.
In a statement on its website, the company said the problem with Gmail was resolved. “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support,” it said. “Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”
