New Delhi: As millions of people began another busy weekday mostly working from home, Google services especially Gmail and Drive suffered a massive outage on Thursday globally, including in India.
Those affected took to social media, reporting issues with opening attachments, failed logins and emails not landing in their inboxes.
After spending several hours in the dark, the services started resuming globally in the evening, with Google saying that Gmail has been restored for some users.
“Gmail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time-frame is an estimate and may change,” the tech giant informed on its Apps Status page.
The statement, however, clearly indicated something big has affected the Google backend servers, but the tech giant was yet to reveal what exactly hit its G Suite services.
For Google Drive, the main issue was file syncing that failed to happen.
The outage was mostly concentrated in the UK, India, Greece, Spain, Germany, France, Japan, and Malaysia, according to the DownDetector map.
Google Gmail is the dominant online email service with over 1.8 billion global active users, with millions in India.
Google video conferencing app Meet that is now integrated with Gmail has grown by around 30 times in the pandemic times.
The affected ones had nowhere but various social media platforms to go to and report their sufferings as their workflow got hampered.
The DownDetector portal that tracks outages showed 62 per cent people facing problems with attachments and 25 per cent reporting issues with log-ins. Thousands of people also took to the DownDetector website to report issues.
The social media platforms were soon flooded with messages.
“GMAIL IS DOWN. I can’t decide if this is wonderfully liberating or wildly stressful,” posted one user on Twitter.
“Can’t send emails, at the same time when you try to compose an email, saving to draft fails too,” another commented.
This is the second time in two months that Gmail suffered such a massive outage.
In July, Google users had a harrowing time in India as Gmail services went down for hours.
“Only can send emails with nothing in them (no text or attachment) – a blank email with a title gets through. I’ve tried different accounts, different networks, different equipment,” posted another Twitter user.
