[Update: Statement] Google, YouTube, Nest, and other services go dark for some users

Ben Schoon | Jun 2 2019 - 12:12 pm PT

Google powers some of the biggest servers on the web today, so anytime there’s even a small outage it can cause trouble for users. This afternoon, several of the company’s services are down including Search, Nest, YouTube, Gmail, and more.

In what seems to be a relatively widespread outage, Google services ranging from Search to Gmail are having problems. Reports started popping up for some major services, like YouTube and Search on DownDetector in the past several minutes, and Twitter has also seen plenty of user reports as well.

Update: As of Sunday evening, this issue seems largely resolved as services come back online. Speaking to The Verge, Google blamed the outage on “high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA.” The company further said it will “conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimize future recurrence.”

This outage seems to be spread across many of the company’s products too. YouTube TV, Google Drive, Analytics, and many other services are reported as not working from users as well. The outage also seems to be affecting some services such as Discord which use Google’s cloud services.

Personally, I’ve seen YouTube on the desktop go out as well as Google Voice being plenty non-functional through the Android app. The Nest app also kicks back an error message on start.

Google’s G Suite Status Dashboard shows which products are affected, and it seems to be almost the company’s entire catalog. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, Groups, Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Vault, Forms, Keep, Tasks, and Voice are all confirmed to be affected by this at least partial outage.

Update: One Googler mentioned on Hacker News that the outage appears related to Google Cloud – specifically Cloud Networking. This means that it affects third-party services such as Snapchat and Discord among others.

Based on DownDetector reports, it seems this issue is primarily occurring on the East Coast of the United States, but some issues are reported in more regions around the globe. Hopefully, Google can squash this bug quickly.