Major Google outage hit Gmail, YouTube and third-party services

Google had a major outage with its Google Cloud, YouTube and G Suite services on Sunday evening and night. As a result, company and third-party services were unavailable for four hours.

The outage started on Sunday evening at about 9:30 PM and ended Sunday night at 1:45 AM, Google reports on its Google Cloud Platform Status Dashboard. Google attributes the outage to network congestion in the eastern part of the US, causing users to experience slow connections and error messages. Google is investigating the outage and will provide more details based on the analysis.

Initially, users in the eastern US in particular reported problems, but along the way, users in other regions also had to deal with poor availability of YouTube and Gmail, including Europe. In addition, services using the Google Cloud Platform were reduced or unavailable, including Snapchat, Vimeo and Discord.

It’s not often that Google has to deal with a disruption of this magnitude. The last time was almost a year ago.