Series of Google’s products, ranging from Google Docs, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Meet, and other Google Services experienced massive service disruption on the early hours of Thursday morning.
Web monitoring firm, Downdetector, confirmed that the downtime started at around 4:40am (5:40am Nigerian Time), and lasted for about six hours before it was resolved.
Sky news reported that Gmail users found the service was crashing when some users attempted to compose a new email.
Others found themselves unable to upload files, either as attachments to emails, or to Google Drive.
In a statement published by Google, the company said:
“The problem with Gmail should be resolved. We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”
“System reliability is a top priority at Google. We are making continuous improvements to make our systems better,” the company added.
According to Downdetector, the problem seem to have been on a global scale, affecting both regular Google users, as well as G-suite users.
Google has over two billion users on both its individual platform, and G-suite platform.
While the customer representative personnel of the company spent time attending to users’ complaints on social media, especially on Twitter, the company highlighted the services that were affected in the disruption.
A summary of the services affected, according to Google are:
- Gmail sending issues
- Meet recording issues
- Creating files issues in Drive
- CSV user upload issues in Admin Console
- Posting message issues in Google Chat
At around 12pm Nigerian Time on Thursday, Google made a report that the issue has been resolved.
“System reliability is a top priority at Google. We are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”
The company however, did not specifically state what caused the disruption.
In March, 2019, Google suffered similar disruption that affected its Gmail services. The disruption then, prevented people from accessing their email, and use the service.