Google LLC has resolved service disruptions in Gmail, Google Drive and other products that left some users unable to upload attachments while preventing others from logging in entirely.

The issues lasted for about six hours from Wednesday evening PDT to early Thursday. 

Data from Ookla LLC’s DownDetector downtime tracking service indicates that the disruption was felt worldwide. DownDetector received thousands of user reports from parts of the U.S., Malaysia, India, Australia and Japan before Google issued a statement at 2:40 a.m. PDT confirming it has resolved the disruption.

The Gmail issues reported by users ranged from difficulties logging in to email sending problems. Some also had trouble uploading message attachments, with Gmail having reportedly displayed “Oops, something went wrong” error messages.

The problems with the other affected services were just as varied. Google Chat users struggled to send messages, while Drive prevented some from uploading new files. There were reportedly also complaints on Twitter from users who were unable to post videos to YouTube, though it’s not clear what was the scope of the issue and whether it was related to the broader service disruption.

The disruption appeared to have unfolded in stages. It started not long before 10:29 p.m. PDT, when Google posted a memo to the G Suite status page saying it was “investigating reports of an issue with Gmail.” The problem seems to have cascaded from there, with the search giant detailing in another memo two hours later that it had started receiving reports about issues in its other products. 

“The problem with Gmail should be resolved,” the search giant stated in its final memo at 4:10 a.m PDT. “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”

Large-scale service disruptions are fairly rare for Google, which operates one of the world’s most advanced data center networks and supports more than two billion G Suite users globally. But when an outage does happen, it can affect a massive number of users simply because of the search giant’s broad market reach. That’s also true for other tech giants, which is why developing new outage mitigation technologies like hydrogen fuel cell-based backup generators is a big part of their engineering roadmaps. 

Photo: Unsplash