Google services are down right now (Update: they’re back)

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Abhimanyu Ghoshal

Managing Editor

Abhimanyu is TNW's Managing Editor, and is all about personal devices, Asia's tech ecosystem, as well as the intersection of technology and (show all) Abhimanyu is TNW's Managing Editor, and is all about personal devices, Asia's tech ecosystem, as well as the intersection of technology and culture. Hit him up on Twitter, or write in: [email protected].

Update (6:04 PM IST / 1:34PM CET): Google services seem to be returning to normal now, after a global outage lasting roughly 40 minutes. However, some users report being logged out of certain Google apps; you may need to log back in before you can use them again.

Update (5:36PM IST / 1:06PM CET): Google Search is up and running now. Other services are still down.

Our original report follows.

Yup, it’s not just you — many Google services, including Gmail, G Suite, and YouTube are unavailable across many countries around the world right now. The cause of the outage is presently unclear. We’ll update this post as we learn more.

That means more than 2 billion users are currently locked out of their email inboxes, cloud storage, documents, and Watch Later playlists. It’s all in keeping with the end times theme of 2020, I guess.

The company’s services previously faced a major outage of this scale back in August. It took around four hours to restore them for some users, reported The Verge. Hopefully we won’t have to wait that long this time around.

Addendum: A Google spokesperson explained the outage was the result of an internal storage quota issue:

Today, at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32AM PT. All services are now restored. We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.