Google Down: Worldwide Outage Disrupts Search, Gmail, & YouTube Services

In the wake of recent global IT disruptions, Google has become the latest casualty in what some are calling an “internet pandemic.”

Users around the world have reported difficulties accessing emails, the search engine, YouTube, and other Google services. Interestingly, these issues were also highlighted online as many users encountered “error” messages on their screens on August 12 (IST).

Downdetector, a platform that tracks online outages, quickly picked up on the situation as the first wave of complaints began rolling in. The site’s graph surged around 9 am ET. The exact cause of this new wave of global outages remains unclear, but it has already become a perplexing issue as many Americans were just starting their workday. One user, @CraigMason, shared on X, “Debugging why the Internet isn’t working at the office…. oh, turns out it’s just @Google that’s down.”

Google Outage Complaints Surge

According to Downdetector’s heat map, the majority of Google-related issues were concentrated in Los Angeles and New York City, with other affected areas including Houston, San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, and Chicago.

In the U.S., 57% of the reported issues were linked to search problems, 31% were related to website access, and 11% were connected to Google Drive.

As frustrated users in the U.S., U.K., and parts of Europe, Asia, and South America struggled to access their workspaces, social media activity surged. Users posted reactions such as, “Trying to Google if Google is down… I think I answered my own question” on X, formerly Twitter.

Among the complaints on Downdetector, one user mentioned that the Chrome PC app wasn’t functioning. Another user commented, “@Google @GoogleIndia @googlechrome @gmail The process Which was sent to me Through DM is not working.”

While some users reported that their issues had been resolved, others continued to experience problems and kept updating their status. A user from the U.K. shared, “Google services here in the UK seem to be struggling, DNS issues, Google search down intermittently.”

Additional complaints on the platform included:

– “Looks like a pretty significant outage, DNS, google cloud, etc.”

– “Web login page not working. On Chrome it just reloads the login page, and Edge it loads a blank page.”

– “#google search engine won’t load for me. Had to go to Bing.”

– “Melon global needs to take the website program/design/engineering seriously. The security code/captcha keeps saying error when using safari. How is this normal? I switched chrome/edge and somehow magically it worked as it should have been.”

– “Google won’t even load, can’t get nothing to work.”