Update: After a major worldwide outage which lasted 45 minutes, Google services have now been fully restored. YouTube is back online, and we've seen its other services - such as Gmail, Drive, Maps and Photos - all fully recover.
The Google Workspace Status Dashboard was showing all services as offline, but it has now been updated and is showing all services as online.
Google has since made a statement on the outage, with a spokesperson saying: "Today [December 14, 2020], at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue.
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"Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32AM PT. All services are now restored.
"We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future."
This error was able to render many services useless for 45 minutes, with personal and professional devices becoming unusable or severely limited during the outage - and users will be keen for Google to ensure a similar situation doesn't happen again.
Not a cyber attack
For those fearing that the Google outage may have been caused by more sinister means, there's good news.
The issue wasn't caused by a cyber attack, it was down to a fault generated by an accounting system. Google has now disabled the offending system and is conducting an investigation.
Original article
It appears Google is having some major issues with Gmail, YouTube and a host of its other associated services currently down.
The Google Workspace Status Dashboard makes for dour reading for anyone who relies on the firms services.
According to Downdetector, services affected include YouTube, Google, Google Meet, Google Hangouts, and Gmail.
Google's business tools are also affected, with users struggling to access Drive, Doc, Sheets etc.
It's not clear whether this is a worldwide issue, but it appears that it is affecting at least Europe.
Phones useless, Nest security offline
The issues appears to be far reaching. Those with Android smartphones will note many of the native Google apps - such as Maps and Photos - are currently not working.
There's bad news for Nest security and thermostat owners too, as the app to handle these functions is also down.
We have contacted Google to ask what has happened. We'll update this article once we get a response.
- From August 2020: Gmail and Google services suffer major outage
