14 DAY TRIAL // A network problem pushed a series of Google services, including Gmail, YouTube, and G Suite offline a few hours ago in the United States, with several other non-Google services, like Snapchat, also experiencing related issues.
Users who tried to log in to these services were unable to do so regardless of operating system and application. For example, YouTube was down both when accessed from the desktop with a browser and on mobile, while Gmail could no longer be accessed with email clients.
Google explained in a post on its service status page that the outage was caused by a so-called network congestion problem that hit the eastern United States, eventually impacting the Google Cloud Networking and Google Compute Engine.
"We continue to experience high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube. Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors. Our engineering teams have completed the first phase of their mitigation work and are currently implementing the second phase, after which we expect to return to normal service,” Google said in an early update on the outage.
Issues already fixed
By the looks of things, only users in the United States were affected by the outage, with impacted areas including San Francisco, Washington, New York, Detroit, and Boston. Users in Montreal also experienced similar connection issues.
Google says it has already resolved the network congestion problem and all services are running normally.
“The network congestion issue in eastern USA, affecting Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube has been resolved for all affected users as of 4:00pm US/Pacific. We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimize future recurrence. We will provide a detailed report of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation. This detailed report will contain information regarding SLA credits,” the latest update reads.
According to Google, the incident was detected at 2019-06-02 12:53 and ended at 2019-06-02 16:56 (US Pacific time).