Google users in Europe have been affected by outages to its main online services.
The search engine, YouTube and Gmail have all been disrupted by technical problems and users have encountered error messages on their computers and phones since Monday afternoon.
Website downtime tracker Down Detector noted more than 10,000 user reports of issues with Google’s services at 2.31 pm on Monday August 12.
Google Workspace, the collective name for the online productivity tools, which include Google Calendar and Google Docs, was also reported down.
Google’s status page indicates that the problems began at 1.38 pm in the UK. The company said it fixed the issues at 4.19pm, several hours after they began after initially “mitigating” their impact.
'‘The issue with Cloud CDN, Cloud Load Balancing, Hybrid Connectivity, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) has been resolved for all affected users,” a Google spokesperson said.
“During the issue, users connecting to GCP [Google Cloud Platform] services from the UK region may have experienced elevated latency, intermittent 500 error rates.
“We will publish an analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation.”
What does that mean? Well, Cloud CDN speeds up website loading by storing content in multiple locations – meaning any problems here can cause pages to load slowly. Meanwhile, cloud load balancing prevents server overload, and issues with this can lead to website crashes or slowdowns.
Finally, hybrid connectivity links is linked to cloud services, so any problems with it can disrupt data transfer and communication.
On social media, people poked fun at the massive glitch as they waited for the services to come back online.
"Ok, who broke Google?" joked one user. "Debugging why the Internet isn't working at the office… oh, turns out it's just Google down," said another user. Another user chimed in with: "Trying to Google if Google is down… Think I answered my own question."
The last major Google outage occurred in May when Google News went offline on both desktop and mobile.
