Gmail down for hours as Google services suffered major outage

Nearly a dozen Google services suffered an hours-long disruption Thursday that left some users unable to send emails or upload files.

The tech titan reported issues across 10 of its Google Suite services starting around 1:30 a.m., including problems with sending Gmail messages, creating files in Drive, posting Chat messages and recording meetings with Google Meet.

Google said at 7:10 a.m. that it had fixed the glitches, which appeared to affect users across the world on both personal Google accounts and those linked to companies using Google Suite services.

“We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support,” the company said on its public status dashboard. “System reliability is a top priority at Google. We are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”

Google-owned video platform YouTube also said it was working to fix delays in processing video uploads that users started experiencing around 1 a.m. It’s unclear whether those problems have been resolved.

The disruption came amid a massive shift to remote work during the coronavirus pandemic that has led companies and their workers to rely heavily on productivity services like Google’s.

Google has not offered an explanation for the problems. The company only referred to its public dashboard in response to emailed questions, including what caused the issues and how many users were affected.

Shares in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, were down 0.3 percent in premarket trading at $1,542.90 as of 5:15 a.m. after losing 0.7 percent Wednesday.