Brief Google Service Outage Rattles Users

Gmail, Classroom were down for over an hour
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 25, 2020 12:30 AM CDT
Brief Google Service Outage Rattles Users
Google says the problem occurred after a pool of servers crashed.   (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

Millions of people are now more reliant on Google services than ever before—and even a brief outage can cause alarm. Services including Gmail, Google Docs, and YouTube went down for around an hour for users on the East and West coasts Thursday night, Engadget reports. According to Downdetector and other tracking websites, the outage peaked around 9pm Eastern and was largely resolved by 10pm. "A pool of servers that route traffic to application backends crashed, and users on that particular pool experienced the outage," tweeted Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president for technical infrastructure.

"We're very sorry for the outage, we know how critical these services are to everyone's lives," Hölzle added. "We're working on a postmortem to ensure this won't happen again." The New York Times notes that the outage "raised anxiety" among people dependent on Google for work or education—and those concerned about technology's role in the election. "Personally I love it when Google Classroom goes down just at the moment when my kids are trying to upload their homework, so everyone freaks out and screams at me when I can’t fix it,” tweeted Classroom user Vanessa Wyeth. (More Google stories.)

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