Google services outage: Gmail, YouTube and Docs temporarily down
Summary
By 1.03pm Gmail appeared to be back up and running in the UK, though users on the south coast, in Brighton and Southampton, were still reporting themselves Gmail-less. In August 2020, Google’s suite of cloud-based services experienced technical difficulties, with users across Europe unable to send emails or upload attachments. Focusing on the inaccessibility of Google Drive, Antony Edwards, chief operating officer at testing and monitoring supplier Eggplant, said, from his own perspective: “Work patterns have changed massively over the year and this is putting new demands and strains on infrastructure. Network operators are at the centre of this and overall have done an amazing job of keeping people connected and dealing with the increased demand, but today’s Google Drive outage highlights just how difficult this is – even the biggest tech companies in the world are struggling to get this right. Companies need fast and reliable testing to be able to roll out changes at speed and ensure they work or risk losing customers to the competition.” Google has yet to give an explanation for the outage.