Google suffered a massive hour-long outage yesterday morning. This afternoon, Gmail is seeing some widespread “Address not found” issues that prevent certain emails from being delivered.

Besides organizing and making your library searchable, Google Photos often generates videos, albums, and other fun works. Google is now creating 3D “Cinematic photos,” while more collage designs and Memories are rolling out.

With the Workspace suite of products, Google wants to leverage machine learning to boost user productivity. One such application of those automated smarts is in Google Meet with Live Captions, which are now available in four more languages.

After being announced in August, Zoom video conferencing is now making its way to the Nest Hub Max. This is just a preview with some technical and geographic caveats for the initial release.

There are a handful of ways to check the weather with Google from Search on the web and Android to Assistant voice commands. As of this evening, Google Weather is partially down worldwide across multiple platforms.

Assistant Routines have recently seen a flurry of developments from Android homescreen shortcuts to a new editing UI, and Google is now rolling out sunset/sunrise triggers for some users.

Back in August, Google redesigned preferences for Assistant to just be one long alphabetical list. The Google Assistant settings page on Android now features a very convenient search field as tweaks to the Routines interface are being tested.

After generating a straightforward playlist with top songs, YouTube Music is now emailing subscribers a “Your 2020 music journey” recap complete with listening stats and other breakdowns.

In mid-November, Google appeared to settle on a compact design for Google Assistant where the activation panel is half as tall and answers don’t take up the entire screen. Google is now widely testing an Assistant design that brings the light bar to all Android phones.

Those that don’t pay for YouTube Music are either using it for the cloud locker or as a lighter YouTube client just for songs. Free YouTube Music users are now seeing a prominent “Upgrade” tab in the bottom bar.

Last month, Google announced that it would fulfill a long-time feature request in its RCS client. End-to-end encryption in Google Messages is now rolling out for some beta users.

Google’s advertising controls today range from seeing why something was served to turning off personalization entirely. Moving forward, the company will let you limit ads that are sensitive in nature, with YouTube being the first to get this option.

Google is rolling out new features across Docs and other Workspace apps to increase interoperability with Word and the Microsoft Office suite. It comes as some teams might choose to use both sets of tools, while others still work with partners that don’t use cloud offerings.

Following this week’s Feature Drop, an update to the Pixel Live Wallpaper app introduces “Conveyor Belt” to the Pixel 5. A rather elaborate moving background, it does not appear to be available for the Pixel 4a.

Google’s browser, especially on mobile, has always had a minimal interface to keep the focus on web content. Chrome houses the vast majority of controls in the overflow menu, which has just been tweaked with icons on Android.

From stricter disclosures to an entirely new platform, Google has been continuously working to make extensions better respect user privacy and more secure. Next year, Chrome will require users to first approve what sites an extension can access in a change to the default behavior.

Google’s Health division today announced that its next project is an application to “make it easier for leading research institutions to connect with potential study participants.” The Google Health Studies app is available for Android and takes advantage of federated learning and analytics.

While Microsoft is clearly focused on iterating the Chromium version of Edge, the company’s previous browser is still available. Google announced today that Workspace apps will cease support for Internet Explorer 11 in March.

Over the years, Google has been working to make “Chrome Sync” optional for more and more browser features. The company is continuing that today by announcing a pair of changes for Chrome on Android and one for desktops.

“Look to Speak” is a new experimental app from Google that helps those with speech and motor impairments communicate through eye gaze technology. 

At the tail end of September, Photos got a revamped editing experience on Android with new features. Notably, there’s a new tab that surfaces machine learning-derived “Suggestions.” Google Photos is now rolling out a slew of new sunset filters that are first coming to the Pixel.