During eight episodes, one in 2013, one in 2014, one in 2018, three in 2020, and two in 2022,

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

suffered from severe outages that disrupted a variety of their services. The first was a five-minute outage of every Google service in August 2013. The second was a 25-minute outage of

Gmail Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...

Google+ Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google p ...

Google Calendar Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service developed by Google. It became available in beta release April 13, 2006, and in general release in July 2009, on the web and as mobile apps for the Android and iOS platforms. ...

, and Google Docs in January 2014. The third was a

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

outage in October 2018. The fourth was a Gmail/

Google Drive Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google. Launched on April 24, 2012, Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud (on Google's servers), synchronize files across devices, and share files. In add ...

outage in August 2020. The fifth, in November 2020, affected mainly YouTube, and the sixth, in December 2020, affected most of their services. The seventh, in August 2022, affected

Google Search Google Search (also known simply as Google) is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the most-visited website in the world. The ...

Maps A map is a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes. Many maps are static, fixed to paper or some other durable medium, while others are dynamic or interactive. Although ...

, Drive and

. The eighth affected Google Maps and

Google Street View Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expan ...

. These outages seemed to be global.

August 2013 services outage

On 16 August 2013, every Google service went down for five minutes. The outage caused internet traffic to drop forty percent worldwide.

January 2014 services outage

On 24 January 2014,

, and Google Docs suffered a 25-minute outage. A statement by Google described the cause:

At 10:55 a.m. PST this morning, an internal system that generates configurations—essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave—encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration. The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users’ requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors. Users began seeing these errors on affected services at 11:02 a.m., and at that time our internal monitoring alerted Google’s Site Reliability Team. Engineers were still debugging 12 minutes later when the same system, having automatically cleared the original error, generated a new correct configuration at 11:14 a.m. and began sending it; errors subsided rapidly starting at this time. By 11:30 a.m. the correct configuration was live everywhere and almost all users’ service was restored.

October 2018 YouTube outage

On 16 October 2018, a global outage disrupted

for approximately one hour and 2 minutes,

YouTube Music YouTube Music is a music streaming service developed by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google. It provides a tailored interface for the service, oriented towards music streaming, allowing users to browse through songs and music videos on YouTube based ...

and

YouTube TV YouTube TV is an American streaming television service operated by YouTube, a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Announced on February 28, 2017, the virtual multichannel video programming distributor offers a selection of live linear channel f ...

were affected as well. When users try to open YouTube, the website only shows a blank page without videos. On the app, an error message read, “There was a problem with the network 03” During the outage, the hashtag #YouTubeDown was trending on

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, Instagram and other social media platforms. This was known by many users as "The Great Youtube Outage of 2018". YouTube acknowledged that on

. After 1 hour and 2 minutes of outage, YouTube was fixed.

August 2020 services outage

On 20 August 2020, over a period of approximately six hours, a global outage abruptly disrupted

's suite of services, including

, Google Docs, Google Meet and

Google Voice Google Voice is a telephone service that provides a U.S. phone number to Google Account customers in the U.S. and Google Workspace (G Suite by October 2020) customers in Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switz ...

. The outage is reported to have started around 06:30 UTC. Google acknowledged the worldwide disruption in the

G Suite Google Workspace (formerly known as Google Apps and later G Suite) is a collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed and marketed by Google. It consists of Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Mee ...

Status Dashboard. Users complained that they were unable to upload files to Gmail, transfer files, and upload files to Google Drive. There were also reports that some users were unable to log in to their Gmail accounts. The reason for the technical issue is not publicly known.

November 2020 YouTube/Google TV outage

On 11 November 2020, another outage occurred on

, Google TV and

Google Play Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store and formerly the Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android operating sy ...

. The outage started at roughly 12:20 UTC. Users experienced problems playing videos, error messages, and errors that caused loading loops. At 04:13 UTC, YouTube gave the all-clear on its

December 2020 services outage

On 14 December 2020, another global outage occurred, affecting authenticated users of most Google services, including

, Google Docs,

and

. The problem was due to a failure in

Google Account A Google Account is a user account that is required for access, authentication and authorization to certain online Google services. It is also often used as single sign on for third party services. Usage A Google Account is required for Gmail, ...

s; services such as YouTube were still accessible with

private browsing Private browsing is a privacy feature in some web browsers. When operating in such a mode, the browser creates a temporary session that is isolated from the browser's main session and user data. Browsing history is not saved, and local data as ...

. Google Workspace Status Dashboard showed all services as operational for approximately 40 minutes before correctly reporting their status as down. The outage started at approximately 11:45 UTC, and Google services were restored around 13:00 UTC. Google identified the issue as an accidental reduction of capacity on their central user ID management system, causing requests that required

OAuth OAuth (short for "Open Authorization") is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords. T ...

-based authentication to fail; this also included the Google Cloud Platform. On 15 December 2020, many emails sent to Gmail servers reported a 550 error code, which incorrectly indicates that the email address does not exist.

August 2022 services outage

Internal 500 error of Google (August 9 2022)

On 8 August 2022,

, Drive and

went down, returning HTTP 500 and HTTP 502 errors. After their services went back online, Google apologised and stated that a software update issue was to blame.

October 2022 Google Maps outage

On 16 October 2022,

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

and Street View went down, resulting in an inability for photos to load and an inability for Street View to function.https://volsiz.ru/en/news-en/2022/10/17/is-google-maps-down-10-16-2022-why-google-maps-is-not-working-today-whats-up-with-google-maps-now/

References

{{Google LLC Criticism of Google 2020 in computing 2020s internet outages 2018 in computing 2010s internet outages 2022 in computing 2013 in computing 2014 in computing