Google has suffered a global outage with reports of its key services not operating.
Beginning at 11.50am (UK time) services such as Gmail, Google Calendar and YouTube failed although the company’s search services were not affected.
Ed Macnair, CEO of Censornet, said: “Google users will have had a shock today, at 11.56, when Google services crashed. The entire Google services suite – including the file storage services Google Drive, email service Gmail and apps such as Google Docs, Slides and Calendar went offline. Not even YouTube was immune. With Google services halted, so were many organisations’ operations.
“According to Google, more than 6 million companies used G Suite (now known as Google Workspace) as of March 2020, which gives us some sense of the scale of the disruption this outage will have caused. There are numerous benefits for businesses to use cloud services, including the ability to collaborate; easy, affordable storage and – as many will have learned in lockdown – the ability to access files remotely. However, outages are one of the risks.
“In times of outage maintaining access to email, the most vital communication channel, is key. To reduce the risk of downtime and its effect on business productivity, organisations need to have fallback solutions – for example, third party providers that secure Gmail can provide an emergency inbox service, accessed via a webmail style interface, that provides access to send and receive emails even when Google services are offline.”
