Google Down: YouTube, Spotify, Hulu and Search Engine Crash Across US, and Social Media Sounds Off

Allison Schonter

03/26/2020 12:40 pm EDT

Social media users are reporting that Google is down. Beginning mid-morning Thursday, tracking site DownDetector.com saw a surge in reports related to Google and associated apps and services, including the Google search engine, YouTube, Spotify, and Hulu. The reports mostly seem to be coming from those in the United States

The reported issues come as people across the world practice social distancing, many employers now having employees work from home and schools moving to online learning amid the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, some have voiced concerns over whether the influx of people using the internet would cause a strain.

At this time, it remains unclear what has caused the apparent outage, and none of the companies have yet released statements, though social media is flooding with users expressing their concern.

Google

Google saw a spike in reported issues on Down Detector beginning just before 10 a.m. Thursday. With only a handful of reports in the hours beforehand, reports surged to more than 13,500 by 10:30 a.m.

Down Detector showed that 69 percent of the reports were are related to log in issues with 30 percent of the reports having to do with search.

YouTube

The video-sharing platform began experiencing just after 10 a.m. on Thursday, with Down Detector logging more than 4,000 reports of service issues at the time of this posting.

Of the reports, 63 percent have to do with watching videos on the platform, 22 percent with the website itself, and 13 percent relating to video upload.

Spotify

Users also reported issues with digital music service Spotify. Beginning at around the same time as YouTube, users reported problems with streaming music (73 percent of reports), issues with the website (17 percent of reports), and problems logging in (8 percent of reports).

Currently, there have been nearly 1,000 reports.

Hulu

Streaming platform Hulu has also been affected by the outage, though Down Detector shows that issues have been coming and going for the past 24 hours. Reports of problems spiked at 1 p.m. Wednesday and dropped again throughout the following hours. Beginning at 10 a.m., however, the issues returned, with nearly 200 reports on Down Detectors.

Of the reports, 68 percent are related to video streaming, 19 percent related to log in, and 12 percent related to the website, according to Down Detector.

Social Media Reacts

The sudden outage immediately caught the attention of social media users, many flocking to Twitter to speak out on the issue and see if others were experiencing the same problems.

"Google Docs just went down for me," wrote one person. "Maybe it's still up in Animal Crossing? I should check."

"Are Google services down for anyone else?" asked another. "Everything from Nest to Chrome Remote Desktop and Gmail is dragging."

"That's just lovely," tweeted somebody else. "The worlds ending, and youtube, and Spotify are both down. I might be losing my mind today. Wtf life?"

"Great, now google is down too," added another person. "that's a wrap, folks. we're done here."

"Gmail Down (not working) – It seems like Google servers are Down (Other Google services like Youtube, Hangouts are also down)," wrote one person.

"First today, my Nest cam's were down and I couldn't log into my account to view them. You fixed that and now my Yale door locks are offline as well as my Nest Thermostat," tweeted another. "What's going on? When will this be fixed."

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