Google Services Down! The Last Remnants of 2020

Google services including Google Chrome, Google, Youtube, and Gmail went down today! For a lot of people, this turned out to be the most unexpected end of 2020.

Google Service Global Outage | source: Downdetector

As Google Cloud went down, so did the websites running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) like Discord. Over3000 people reported the server issue.

Applications (some of which) use GCP and/or were down alongside Google | source: Downdetector

According to the Downdetetctor, the global outage lasted approximately one hour. Over 56,000 people reported the issue.

Google server status in the last 24 hours | source: Downdetector

The Google home page was showing Google 400 bad request error. It’s a client error (HTTP status code), which means that the server cannot process the request.

In the time being, #YouTubeDown has been trending on Twitter. In the seven minutes since YouTube was down, more than 12k people tweeted about it.

Google acknowledged the issue and restored the services in time. You can click on the red button in the left-most panel to check the current status of individual services.

Google Workspace Status Dashboard during the Google downtime | source: Downdetector

All services are now operational, indicated by the green dot at the right of the service name.

Google Workspace Status Dashboard — All Services Operational | source: Downdetector

With the whole world being dependent on Google, the big question here is,

What does it mean and will the issue happen again?!

It’s a question of Google’s integrity. Only time will tell if people consider other cloud platforms like AWS or Azure over GCP or another search engine as Bing or Yahoo over the infamous Google!