Google, YouTube, and More Go Down Sending Users Into Confusion

Google and some of its associated apps and services went down on Sunday, sending Internet users into a frenzy.

Online, there is no presence bigger than Google, which makes it no surprise that an outage from the site can be devastating to Internet users. The world’s largest search engine encompasses social media platforms, email and cloud services, YouTube and many other functions. On Sunday, many of them seemed to be effected by reported outages.

The website Down Detector noted a huge spike in outage reports from Google starting at around 3 p.m. ET. The reports peaked at 4,373 outages, counting the site’s users. Of those reports, 86% were related to log-in issues while 13% were related to search issues.

According to Down Detector’s live outage map, the biggest concentration of issues were in the north-eastern United States. Another prominent patch was located around southern California, and reports came from all over the world as well — South America, Europe, South Africa and Australia included. Of course, this represents only the reports registered to the site.

The issues affected many of Google’s most popular services, notably YouTube. The ubiquitous viewing platform is an entertainment mainstay for many people these days, and an outage on a weekend was not welcome. Before long, users were flooding social media sites like Twitter to complain, and see if others were having the same issues.

Others had issues with Gmail, Google’s online email service. Many reported a 503 error, which comes with a screen offering little help of insight about the problem.

“That’s an error,” reads the message. “There was an error. Please try again later. That’s all we know.”

The error screen is accompanied by a drawing of a partially disassembled robot, but for many users getting locked out of their email is not such a cute matter. Online, people complained about being unable to get work done or keep up with important correspondences.

Even Snapchat was affected by Sunday’s outage. The mobile social media app is hosted on Google’s Cloud service, and so it became unavailable on a spring day when many were doubtless feeling photogenic.

Other apps taken out by the issues included Discord, a service for private messaging and chatrooms among online communities, and Nest, Google’s app for smart home products that control thermostats, smoke detectors, security systems and other newly-computerized amenities.

So far Google has not responded to the issues with its cloud service, and there is no word on when the effected sites will be up and running again.