Google confirms a brief, but major outage affecting Gmail and Workspace is now resolved
Google took an unexpected coffee break
If you had trouble logging into your Gmail or Google Drive this morning, you weren’t alone. A partial but significant outage hit a whole slate of Google’s services, essentially locking users out of their digital lives for a bit.
A reminder of our digital dependency
Status of the Google Workspace service earlier today. | Image credit — DownDetector
Let’s be clear: this is more than just a minor inconvenience. For the millions of businesses, schools, and individuals who live and breathe inside the Google ecosystem, an hour of downtime can bring productivity to a screeching halt. It’s a stark reminder of just how reliant we’ve become on these massive cloud platforms.
This is also a moment where the competition, namely Microsoft, gets to sit back and smile. While Google users were scrambling, folks using the Microsoft 365 ecosystem were humming along just fine. Outages like this, even brief ones, can cause IT departments to second-guess their reliance on a single provider.
A hiccup, not a catastrophe
All that said, although it was a bit of a mess for about an hour, it’s important to keep things in perspective. Outages happen to every single major tech company; it’s the nature of running services at such an immense scale. The real test is how quickly a company can jump on the problem and get things running again.
Personally, I was affected while trying to access files on Google Drive, and that brief moment of “uh oh” is never fun. However, the fact that Google identified, addressed, and resolved a login issue across its global infrastructure in roughly an hour is actually pretty impressive. I need to make sure I have an offline copy of my Drive files for the next time this happens.
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