Is Google Still Down? What We Know About the Gmail, Workspace and Drive Outage
It appears Google has resolved the incident that caused a short-lived, but widespread outage.
Many Google services seem to be suffering outages.
Did you having trouble accessing Google services on Friday? You're not the only one. The tech giant was experiencing difficulties, with services including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Meet and Google Workspace all affected.
It seems that the troubles began around 8.a.m PT on Friday morning, just as many people in the US were beginning their work day. At this time, Downdetector saw sharp spikes in reports across all Google services. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
Google acknowledged the incident on the Workspace Status Dashboard page, but declared it closed with 46 minutes. In response to a request for comment, the company pointed us back to the dashboard page.
Hardware Infrastructure Failure
Google's status update.
In an update, Google said the issue had been mitigated for all users as of 8.56 a.m. PT.
"A subset of workspace customers experienced elevated latency and error rates using workspace services," it said.
"Our initial investigation points to a hardware infrastructure failure as the likely cause. Engineers have mitigated the workspace impact by routing the traffic away from the affected hardware infrastructure.
"We thank you for your patience while we're working on resolving the issue."
Reports dropping
It looks like as quickly as the outage arrived, Google has managed to resolve the problem.
Downdetector reports have dropped off as quickly as they spiked. At their peak, they reached 4,000 across Google generally, and 3,500 across Gmail.
On Google's Status dashboard, it's marked the incident as "closed," saying it lasted for a total of 46 minutes.
Google Incident Report
Google's first incident report.
Shortly after reports of the outage started appearing online, Google issued an incident report on the Google Workspace Status Dashboard.
"Various Workspace services are experiencing elevated latency and error rates," the report said. It also confirmed that the affected services include Gmail, Google Drive, Google Meet and Google Workspace.