In a major blow for the many millions of us who rely on its services, Google is currently experiencing an outage affecting various products in different locations around the world. Gmail and YouTube are among the apps currently not available to users, and we've been able to confirm ourselves that the outage is ongoing in the UK, Germany, and India.

Reports started circulating on Twitter that YouTube was down, and when we checked we noticed other Google services are also in the same boat. It now appears that Gmail, Photos, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and so on are also struggling right now. Downdetector confirms this, with its map showing outages mostly centered in Europe but also reaching other areas in every content.

When I try to load Gmail, I get the following message telling me that my account is temporarily unavailable. If you try to use the Google apps launcher, you'll likely see this error message. At least when you try to use YouTube you get a nice illustration of a monkey in a red hat. That's something. I can also confirm that Nest is down for me, which means I can't access any video feeds from Nest cameras in my home. Even the Discover feed on Android phones has been unavailable.

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It's a similar story across most of Google's apps right now, on both mobile on desktop. Some people might find that using an incognito tab or accessing services without being signed in will work, so the issues could have something to with Google accounts specifically. We'll keep an eye on the situation and update here when we learn more.

Things are beginning to recover...

Gmail is now loading and I was able to send myself (and receive) an email, although I do still get the below error pertaining to contacts.

YouTube is back up for Manuel in Germany, but is only half loading here in the UK. A Google Photos upload also just went through for me (with screenshots of broken Google apps), and Karan is reporting that Docs, Drive, and YouTube are all up and running again in India.

So it's fair to say that things are slowly returning to normal, although multiple apps are still showing errors for certain people in some locations, so it'll be a while before the outage is completely over.

Most importantly, I've just checked and Stadia is working. So if you're unable to do your job because of Google's outage, you can at least still play Cyberpunk.

Normal service resumed

It appears as though all Google services are back to normal now and the Google Workspace Status Dashboard confirms this — all of the apps are now showing a green "no issues" status.

Thankfully, the outage was pretty brief, even though it was widespread and global in nature. Fingers crossed whatever caused it is now fully dealt with and we won't have to go through that same rollercoaster of emotions again any time soon.