SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 16, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – Google’s cloud-hosted email service
suffered a “significant” disruption Tuesday, just a day after it went down
during a massive outage of the internet giant’s platform.
Google said on a status dashboard that it had Gmail operations back in
order shortly before 0000 GMT, about two and a half hours after people
started complaining of problems.
“We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and
continued support,” Google said in the status dashboard notice.
“Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google,
and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”
Google did not disclose the number of users affected or the precise cause
of the trouble.
The problem with Gmail affected “a significant subset of users,” the
company said in a post.
Gmail users encountered error messages, high latency and other unusual
behavior at the service, according to Google.
A massive blackout on Monday temporarily disrupted popular Google services
such as Gmail and video-sharing platform YouTube, derailing the remote
learning, work and entertainment that people have come to rely on during the
pandemic.
About 17,000 people reported Gmail service problems at a peak point at
about 2:30 pm (2230 GMT) in California, where Google has its headquarters,
according to the website Downdetector.
Other Google services such as YouTube, Maps and search appeared to be
operating normally.
The broad outage on Monday lasted about 45 minutes.
Services that require users to log into accounts such as YouTube or Gmail
had “higher error rates” than usual, resulting in people being denied access,
Google said of the Monday outage. Google indicated on its dashboard during
that outage that it involved services for “the majority of users.”
Already ubiquitous, online services have become more critical this year
amid the Covid-19 pandemic, as millions work from home and students take
their classes online.
Disruptions to online service providers are not unusual. Amazon Web
Services (AWS), the Amazon subsidiary specializing in on-demand cloud
services for businesses and individuals, experienced a major technical outage
in November.