Google was hit by outages in the early hours of Wednesday morning in the UK, as users all around the world reported problems with Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts and Google Maps.
The outage, which lasted for several hours, seemed to peak at 2am (GMT) according to website DownDetector, with errors reported all the the way through to this morning, although Google claimed to have fixed the issues at 6:30am.
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In a statement on their 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 other unexpected behaviour.”
It’s unsure how widespread the issue was. I was, for some reason, up at 3:30am writing a news story, and during that time I also accessed Gmail without any obvious problems. Google’s status page has confirmed that accessing files or downloading them in Gmail was the issue, and Drive was having problems letting users download or upload files.
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Twitter user OhNoitsFusl points to the archival efforts of the Archive Team, suggesting that their attempts to archive Google+ could have caused the issues for Google, pointing towards the similar outage Tumblr experienced after announcing their adults only ban, prompting Archive Team to try and capture all of that content, too.
Looks like Archive Team’s efforts to archive Google+ killed the entire Google infrastructure, seeing errors literally everywhere. Similar how AT killed @tumblr in the rush of getting everything and anything archived. pic.twitter.com/gIRQlGhgIe
— Fusl ?️?? (@OhNoItsFusl) March 13, 2019
Currently, the Google services status page is a row of green lights. So if, like us, you rely on a lot of Google services to do your job properly, it’s time to get back to work. Probably.
Hopefully you were asleep, but if you were affected by the brief Google outage — the Google blip, if you will — reach out to us on Twitter at @TrustedReviews.